Michael McDonough
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Michael McDonough grew up in the suburbs of New York, Atlanta and Boston, and currently lives in Mansfield, MA. Employed as a cartographic researcher for eight years, Michael has facilitated the writing workshop for Poetribe and the Bridgewater Poetry Slam for four years. A graduate of Bard College, he is leaving to pursue an MFA in Creative Writing at New School University in New York. He is the author of a previous chapbook, A Map of Barren Island, and a spoken word CD, Voices From the Bridge. His work has appeared in The Newport Review, and Switched on Gutenburg, an e-journal out of the University of Washington.
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Corpus
(an installation by Ann Hamilton at Mass MoCA)
Rose organza lights factory windows.
Translucent sheets of onionskin float
from rafters rigged with pulleys, wires.
Voices drift, nest. We make snow angels,
airplanes. Ear-shaped speakers drop
slowly, mark aisles, nave, rise again.
Goodman Brown looked at Faith,
saw nothing but sin. The teacher
commanded her to pray to Stalin for bread.
Hard candies rained from the ceiling,
the apparatchik within. The machine
scalped her, wove her hair in coarse linen.
Bone thins to paper, to ash. From the pulpit,
the projector's word rotates, a beacon
warning of shoals. Under the loft, a dark
maze of spinning speakers beat air to foam.
Pneumatics tick and breathe. Space
flutters, brushes your skin, a forgotten hand.
Ferry to Nantucket
1.
Leaving Hyannis, I edit
my relationships to a 90-minute
mix tape left with the tombstone
rubbing, the broken wheel cover
n the trunk. Parked at the Mary Dunn lot,
the car refuses metaphor at $10 per day.
The watch falls off my wrist
whether I love or am torn by
ambivalence, the slowest form
of transport known. Without ferry
no island is home.
2.
The boat faces sun and horn,
announcement splits water,
sky, pocket for my keys, a perfect arc:
sails ripple no painted bedsheet but breath
and turning, stern in. The shot
kisses the rim, drops.
3.
The moment hull
nudges slip I am beached:
steeple, flakeyard, cobblestone
shattered clam, pickleweed salad,
crab parts hacked by gulls,
loon with neck eaten,
head in the sand, skin tickled
by eelgrass feelers, salt
tide, wind: arrive
4.
People become animals. They die
into bone, wrack lines of matted fur,
star maps littered underfoot,
luminescence with me when I sleep,
cook my food, or accept the gift,
more than I can repay by dying.
