Collection of Poetry by Jill McDonough
Professor of English, Director of the MFA in Creative Writing
Accident, Mass Ave.
I stopped at a red light on Mass. Ave.
in Boston, a couple blocks away
from the bridge, and a woman in a beat-up
old Buick backed into me. Like, cranked her wheel,
rammed right into my side. I drove a Chevy
pickup truck. It being Boston, I got out
of the car yelling, swearing at this woman,
a little woman, whose first language was not English.
But she lived and drove in Boston, too, so she knew,
we both knew, that the thing to do
is get out of the car, slam the door
as hard as you fucking can and yell things like What the fuck
were you thinking? You fucking blind? What the fuck
is going on? Jesus Christ! So we swore
at each other with perfect posture, unnaturally angled
chins. I threw my arms around, sudden
jerking motions with my whole arms, the backs
of my hands toward where she had hit my truck.
But she hadn't hit my truck. She hit
the tire; no damage done. Her car
was fine, too. We saw this while
we were yelling, and then we were stuck.
The next line in our little drama should have been
Look at this fucking dent! I'm not paying for this
shit. I'm calling the cops, lady. Maybe we'd throw in a
You're in big trouble, sister, or I just hope for your sake
there's nothing wrong with my fucking suspension, that
sort of thing. But there was no fucking dent. There
was nothing else for us to do. So I
stopped yelling, and she looked at the tire she'd
backed into, her little eyebrows pursed
and worried. She was clearly in the wrong, I was enormous,
and I'd been acting as if I'd like to hit her. So I said
Well, there's nothing wrong with my car, nothing wrong
with your car...are you OK? She nodded, and started
to cry, so I put my arms around her and I held her, middle
of the street, Mass. Ave., Boston, a couple blocks from the bridge.
I hugged her, and I said We were scared, weren't we?
and she nodded and we laughed.
1
Casual Sleep
I dream we’re all so tired all
the time we start watching strangers
sleep. Videos of people asleep
all snuggled up in flannel, under down.
Sleep-tastic grow the YouTube channels.
Mattress stores tuck sleepers in their tidy
cotton beds. A cottage industry yawns
open: major in Sleep, become a Sleep Coach.
Commodity, new field: I was in finance but now
I’m in sleep. Sleepers in shop windows wrapped
in fleece, conked out on couches. Subway riders
scroll through sleepers on their smartphones,
brushing sleep from dreamers’ eyes with thumbs.
On Craigslist, “Strictly Platonic,” one man’s
an open minded expert, can sleep for days,
his listing says. He can sleep through literally anything.
He lists his biceps’ circumference, the height his shoulder
could heft or nestle your heavy head. The best
sleep of your life, he promises, next to a photo of him
in crisp, sky blue pajamas. Brushing his perfect teeth.
Do What You Love
Do what you love, they said. The money
will follow, they said. They didn’t say what
the money should follow, or who. Poor money, lost
money: money must have been so much confuse!
One money, twice, eleven monies, four: money trying
to keep it together, ragged flock of non-native stragglers,
lollygaggers, each losing their buddy, special follow-time
friend. Money talks, but not like I do. Poor monies, mute
ESL-speaking lost souls. Do what you love and the money
will follow. Until it gets distracted, follows somebody else!
Until love doubles back, shrugs money off its trail. Money
follows love like good money after bad. Bad money!
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Mad money, bad habits, dying hard. Do what you love,
they said, but what if what you love is watching Die Hard
for the dozenth time? When maybe you can’t sleep?
Look at poor Bruce Willis’s poor bloody feet: pause
it there, make popcorn with nutritional yeast,
talk about how there must be some sneakers
somewhere in that building. But no. Alas! There wasn’t
any time. No time for shoes? Baby needs a new pair
of shoes; mama don’t work for free, Sandra says. Time
is money, they said, and you are profligate, spendthrift,
a lazy-ass wastrel, leaning in doorways, on bars, leaning back
on Wright’s hammock, again and again. Again. Lolling,
lollygagging, shrugging when they I know you must be
very busy, grinning when they sigh how busy they are.
Busy! Not so much! Because you do you, baby; keep
doing what you love: nothing. Nothing that is not there
and the nothing that is oh, nothing. Nothing much.
I Dream We Try
I dream we try gun manufacturers as terrorists
and win. The Gun Industry’s a team of sneering
white guys. Suits, saying all the wrong stuff. Am I
a lawyer? Witness? I am Julia Roberts in Pelican Brief
and Erin Brockovich. I say crossfire more than terrorism,
and schoolkids, every day. Their lawyer’s smarmy,
dismissive, saying Sandy Hook and of course
those beautiful children and I say No, the other ones.
The ones you make us take for granted, the ones
that you can’t see. Black kids shot dead daily, whole
zones we’ve given up. He smirks. What about cars, cars
kill people. Says bears, terrorists, sharks. But in the dream
I’d said enough. Whatever I said worked. Everyone laughed
at the gun guys, gun guys crying shark. We won, won
instant reparations. Our dead spun back to before.
Not like zombies, not like the monkey’s paw. Just
back, all better, all gun deaths now undone. Dried blood
gone bright, pulling back into her pink slacks, his black
hoodie’s holes, now healed. At first we’re scared; it’s not
just kids, it’s everyone. Good guys and bad, soldiers
from forever now come home. We get them all back. To help
with what’s next. And we know who the terrorists are.
3
Ming
"That's why we don't keep things in stairwells."
--Mary Warnement, The Boston Athenaeum
When the former curator remembers the Ming,
remembers knocking it over, he remarks, "the thing
took fucking forever for fall." Shaking
his heavy head. Inside, the Ming's still taking
its time. Still falling. Look: he opened the magic door,
invented a way of making more
time. All of us always longing for longer, a few extra hot
days in July, sunshine, more time with the kids. Not
this endless loop, cringing eternity, fucking forever in the poor
guy's vase-sized head. Scott asks if I'd be twenty again. Not for
all the money in the world. But then I sort of take
it back, bargain: would I for sure meet Josey? Could I bank
the money I did not give back to the world—just Jeter's share,
net worth of the board of Goldman Sachs—relive those years
and then have the rest of my life with her, her and fewer
jobs? A car, dishwasher, dryer. New roof, newer
shoes, Josey's never-swollen one-shift-a-week knees.
Go back to twenty, to the instant the Ming first leans
into thinner air. This vase makes it through Breughal,
the new world, microscopes. From bustles to Google
to finally fall. But not finally anything: always it slips
from a half-hearted shelf, fresh from its crated straw, his fingertips
always in reach. You gain a week, say, week of replay, your fault
in the space time continuum, week of stutter and halt
taken back in slivers of seconds, in panicked gasps, sleep rent
again. You gain a week. This is how it's spent.
4
Bill Corbett’s One Fund Boston Box
Shore Leave, South Boston
When Josey waits on the Portuguese Tall Ship seamen
and the local girls they just picked up, they order
Long Island Iced Teas. Josey loves them anyway, their adorable
accents, dress whites, quick success with the ladies.
So she takes out the four white spirits, talks about how
each can shine: Vodka with caviar and blini; gin
with its cardomom, black pepper spice; tequila, straight with sangrita,
Hemingway daiquiri rum. But together, she tells them, blunted
with triple sec, Coke, what’s the fucking point. They love her, take her up
on Hearsts and Aqueducts, give her an enameled Tall Ship pin.
They want to take the girls back, lucky girls, cook for them
in the galley. What is this thing, one asks Josey, this small
thing it comes with martinis. When she tells him he cries out
Olives! I will cook for you cod with olives. One girl
makes a face, says it’s too late to eat but the other kicks her
under the bartop, says I’m starving. I think that sounds great.
So Pretty
So pretty we say to strangers sharing
a cab over a causeway, or
next to us, en route to JFK. Shaking
our heads together over our oval of sunset,
our lightning lighting up our clouds. 6A's
reading up on what happens after death,
the spirit world powers she'll get when she's divine.
Strangers are crazy. But we can still agree:
so pretty, the child's hair in the Stop & Shop line,
somebody's laughing baby on the T. Her
little body! Your neighbor's fresh
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clapboards, freshly caulked seams. Fragrant lure
of stripes of fresh-mown grass. So pretty: so
empty, so touching, how we fall so short so close.
Still Falling
My friend’s trying to stop smoking, and I say Oh cut yourself some slack, sick
of pretending we’re not going to die. We are going to die still falling
for crap about berries, a glass of red wine. It could be worse. We’re not suicidal,
smack fiends, Swazi. So we’re still skipping the gym, still eating fries, still falling
to sleep with the TV on. Whatever. We’re daily closer to dying, but
it appears to happen slow. Nightfall, dusty snow, cold night still falling,
he laughs, long rope of smoke, warm breath rising. Right. We each
hang ourselves, but it’s a long rope, Jill. See? We’re all still fine, still falling.
The 30
Jogging toward the bus on Columbus I see it’s already crowded, squeeze my way to
the back. I think it’ll get worse in Chinatown, but I’m wrong. This early the produce
shoppers still crowd the sidewalks, admire bouquets of hanging lacquered ducks.
Shipping containers full of persimmon-colored persimmons, a red-gloved woman
picking over the lot. Guavas, broccoli, collards, grapes of every description.
November, persimmons thirty-nine cents a pound. One woman nestles in with me
and four others in the way back. Comfortable, we’re sleepy as puppies, not worried:
nobody smells. She turns her iPod up, plays “Tell Me Something Good” loud enough
for us all to hear as we pass Jade Galore, Fat Tang Hotel, persimmon piles big as
Volkswagen bugs. After “Tell Me Something Good,” it’s The Cure, “Without You,” and
we are happy, snug in our collective nostalgia, passing the Modesto Food
Distributors truck: its slogan, Poultry in Motion. Yellow transfers safe in our pockets.
Good for all trips till ten.
The Money
after Julie Mehretu's “Mural”
I went to visit the money. Which is a mural
at Goldman Sachs which don’t even
6
get me started. They don’t let you any
closer than the sidelines, security desk
on the right. No way past the uniformed
men, electronic gates, but, ma’am,
you can exit the building, look in
through rain-spotted plate glass. I got
ma’am-ed, smiled, stood in the rain outside
the money. Here’s who I saw go in, who I saw
belongs there, who it has to be said never even
glanced at the money: short white men in natty
suits—is it rude to note they’re short? If I admit
the suits are natty? A beautiful woman
in red-soled shoes. The red soled shoes brown
suede. Red soles mean, yes, they are money.
Another woman with her laptop in a cush
grey flannel felt case. Money. Classy, classy
money. These people know how to shop. These people
are nice and dry. I’m wet, in a wet
blue rain coat, fogging up a nose-height spot
on the window. Hands, forehead pressed like a child’s
to the shark tank, looking in at the beautiful
money. It looks like this: confusion
of streamlined detail, all the colors. Calders
in a blender. Flight paths, grids over maps over
wires. Plus an orange square I really like. More
than you can see at one time with just
your eyes. You have to pace back and forth
in the rain, get glimpses of money, between
columns, through rain-spotted glass.
Try
You just try to hand them some hot chocolate,
said EMTs at the scene. Of the unscathed
milling in shock, after someone opened fire.
Women’s Prison Every Week
Lockers, metal detectors, steel doors, C.O.
to C.O., different forms, desks—mouth open, turn—so
slow I use the time to practice patience,
grace, tenderness for glassed-in guards. The rules
7
recited as if they were the same rules every week:
I can wear earrings. I cannot wear earrings. I can wear
my hair up. I cannot wear my hair up. I dressed
by rote: cords in blue or brown, grey turtleneck, black
clogs. The prisoners, all in grey sweatshirts, blue jeans,
joked I looked like them, fit in. I didn’t think about it,
until I dreamed of being shuffled in, locked
up in there, hustled through the heavy doors.
In the dream the guards just shook their heads, smirked
when I spelled my name, shook the freezing bars.
Instead of nightly escorts out, I’d stay in there
forever. Who would know? So I went to Goodwill,
spent ten bucks on pink angora, walked back down those halls
a movie star. When I stood at the front of the class
there rose a sharp collective sigh. The one
who said she never heard of pandering
until the arraignment said OK, I’m going
to tell her. Then she told me: freedom is wasted
on women like me. They hate the dark cotton, jeans
they have to wear, each one a shadow of the other
their whole sentence. You could wear red! she accused.
Their favorite dresses, silk slips, wool socks all long gone,
bagged up for sisters, moms—maybe Goodwill,
maybe I flicked past them looking for this cotton candy pink
angora cardigan, pearl buttons. They can’t stop staring, so
I take it off and pass it around, let each woman hold it
in her arms, appraise the wool between her fingers,
a familiar gesture, second nature, from another world.
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