Lynn McGee
Crush, 14
I talk to you with ear buds, gliding downhill
on my bike. A metal bridge sings and the Amtrak
passes beneath me, silver roofs flashing. We talk
past sailboats tethered in the Hudson, bare masts
lurching. We talk past the airline carrier, khaki
and steel museum looming at the pier, hull cinched
at the waterline. A family in white running shoes
breezes by on rented bikes. A helicopter hovers
and its blades send blasts of sound like giant sheets
snapping. Sometimes we pause, you and I, and silence
is the marrow in our conversation. I breathe it in,
content as that girl I knew in high school, the one
who would talk with her boyfriend, lights out,
bedroom door closed, boxy phone and springy cord
under the covers, and neither hung up as they
fell asleep in each other’s ears.
Crush, 15
My flight is delayed. Air masses glide across
the Midwest, grand as pachyderms, oblivious
to the havoc they cause. A jet descends,
its trajectory a slanted line toward the runway,
then the wheels hit tarmac, wings tipped
with ailerons rigid as a dancer’s hands pointing
up, her arms outstretched. How many times,
did my father try to teach me the physics of flight —
why there is lift, what holds up the tonnage
of an aircraft as it follows the earth’s curve.
His loneliness grounded him, and mine
grounds me—yet here I am listening
for the gate announcement, ready to rise.
Editor’s Note: What Rough Beast welcomes poems in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The usual editorial guidelines apply—we don’t generally like poems that dwell overmuch on the shortcomings of the Trump administration—It simply does not usually make for good poetry. Poems may allude to the administration’s catastrophic negligence in responding to this pandemic, but we’d rather read about your personal experience of the pandemic than a critique of the administration’s response.
Lynn McGee is the author of Tracks (Broadstone Books, 2019) and Sober Cooking (Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2016), as well as two award-winning poetry chapbooks, Heirloom Bulldog (Bright Hill Press, 2015) and Bonanza (Slapering Hol Press, 1996). Here poems have appeared in the American Poetry Review, Southern Poetry Review, Ontario Review, Phoebe, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sun Magazine, and The New Guard, among other journals, as well as in the anthology Stonewall’s Legacy (Local Gems Press, 2019), edited by With José Pelauz, McGee wrote the children’s book Starting Over in Sunset Park (Tilbury House Publishers, 2020). She serves on the advisory board of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and co-curates the Lunar Walk Poetry Series with Gerry LaFemina and Madeleine Barnes. Online at lynnmcgee.com.
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