gary mcdowell

“THOUGHTS AND PRAYERS”

God may be capitalized or it may be lowercase, but
thoughts and prayers can go right up your ass. Anger
isn’t contagious anymore than a yawn is, and yet
we hide our faces when the news alert dings on

our phones. I have crossed roads without looking; I have
screamed until my throat was a sinking ship; I have
more atoms in my body than seconds in the Universe’s
age. Couldn’t I spare a few, their infinite smallness,

to ask, to cleave, to birth—by God—this terror that
haunts us? There is a bottom. We’ve all seen it, held
it, some of us, even, in our hands. It’s cold, the metal
heavy, but, god, the shudder from the palms into

the forearms, up the shoulders and into the heart when
you squeeze the trigger. What aliens have we become?

“WHAT I LEARNED TODAY”

Now that the leaves are opening—an elegy for
tree roots and AK-47s, violin strings and the whip
of my head when a cicada buzzes too low. Dear
God the aftertaste. Dear God the laughter. The wind

changes and dear God so do I, straight through the throat,
dear God. All the parts of me make a shape, but none
of them are a foothold. Even scarecrows, even Presidents
too stupid—rivers flow downhill, roil in their silt,

spit themselves forth at every fork—too stupid—only
frozen rivers know stillness like the kind we feel when
we’ve been lied to—too stupid. There’s a darkness all
the way down when night is at its deepest, a notch, a stalk,
a stem: Something to hold onto. We don’t need a guide,
Mr. President, we just need you to shut your fucking mouth.

Gary McDowell has published seven books, the latest of which are Aflame (White Pine Press, 2020), winner of the 2019 White Pine Press Poetry Prize; Caesura: Essays (Otis Books/Seismicity Editions, 2017); and Mysteries in a World That Thinks There Are None (Burnside Review Press, 2016), winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Book Award. He is also the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems and essays have appeared in American Poetry Review, The Nation, The Southern Review, Gulf Coast, Ploughshares, and New England Review, among others. He teaches creative writing at Belmont University in Nashville, TN.