James McKee
Bio: James McKee enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Gotham. His debut poetry collection, The Stargazers, was published in the spring of 2020, and his poems have appeared or are forthcoming in New Ohio Review, The Ocotillo Review, Illuminations, CutBank, The Raintown Review, Flyway, Saranac Review, THINK, The Midwest Quarterly, Xavier Review, and elsewhere. He spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.
Terminus
There were never many trains for us to takeand most are long gone by now.The big arrivals board is blank. Or broken.The help desk went dark hours ago.
That scruffy local crosses the decrepit hallfor another quick one at the bar.He seems amused to find us still here, still spikedon our droll illusion, departure.
Phone-faced children sprawl like flotsam. Another familyis escorted off: when you ask why, a uniform shrugs.The woman feeding the trash pyramided over its binpivots away as it gently avalanches.
On the newschannel, floodscapes, char, a cataractof protest. Heart attack orange splattersmap after map. Arrows knit cartel hierarchiesor evacuation routes. Red carpets fritter.
They’re garbling the announcements now, unless I’ve lost my earfor the beige idioms of official disregard.Adscreens on endless loop splash an ice-blue glowthat eases our passage from outraged to bored.
Your turn to luggage-sit, mine to scavenge a concourseof forlorn boutiques. For some change, the soldierwith no legs offers the eye-contact I instantly regret.If it’s too late, fuck it, his placard reads.
That scruffy local crosses the decrepit hallfor another quick one at the bar.He seems amused to find us still here, still spikedon our droll illusion, departure.
Phone-faced children sprawl like flotsam. Another familyis escorted off: when you ask why, a uniform shrugs.The woman feeding the trash pyramided over its binpivots away as it gently avalanches.
On the newschannel, floodscapes, char, a cataractof protest. Heart attack orange splattersmap after map. Arrows knit cartel hierarchiesor evacuation routes. Red carpets fritter.
They’re garbling the announcements now, unless I’ve lost my earfor the beige idioms of official disregard.Adscreens on endless loop splash an ice-blue glowthat eases our passage from outraged to bored.
Your turn to luggage-sit, mine to scavenge a concourseof forlorn boutiques. For some change, the soldierwith no legs offers the eye-contact I instantly regret.If it’s too late, fuck it, his placard reads.
A Poem about Love (Not a Love Poem)
The best way to hold on to something is to pay no
attention to it. The things you love too much perish.
Dmitri Shostakovich
Around here, I never know how much I’ll have to carewhen the next thing fails, or goes missing, or just ends.For example, along the avenue I walk down every dayI don’t always have to notice that for every treethere are far more ex-trees: thick amputated columns,or stubby little stumps, or scraped plots of dirtthe color of cement, or squares of actual cementwhere someone just said OK, enough with this.
They pass like boxes checked on some medical form.So many? That can’t be good.
There’s a way I go sometimes, not often, a sidestreetI’d say I almost loved, if asked to name my favorite street,though only children ask such questions and I don’t have kids.And to admit it’s because of some tree, well, you can imaginehow that’d go. Still, it is why: one tall silver maple,the grain of whose pewtery bark records how the trunkarched away from the buildings and flexed up, out,and over the street, reaching for light and space.Its posture reminds me every time of Michelangelo’s Libyan Sybil,though a quick image search shows no resemblancebeyond an excuse to remember a place where I was happy.
Which brings me to Shostakovich. His advice,like most good advice, is inarguably trueand impossible to follow. Because I know how one desolating day I’ll finally come upon that treefreshly cut down, do I avoid this block, start the farewell now? No,I just forget about it, like I forget everything exceptthe next thing I need to do and maybe the thing after that, and walkanyhow, and go on finding myself there, low orange sun behind me,the non-sybil still not cut down. Time again to wonder if I so love Romeonly because I can’t live there, and what love for his childrendid to Shostakovich during the Great Terror, and how muchit has cost me to survive the violent love that is the oppositeof both pretended neglect and real neglect,and when, at long last, our Earth will have had enoughof whatever it is—call it love—that goes on cutting down moreand more of the trees it didn’t even have to plant, along with those it did.
There’s a way I go sometimes, not often, a sidestreetI’d say I almost loved, if asked to name my favorite street,though only children ask such questions and I don’t have kids.And to admit it’s because of some tree, well, you can imaginehow that’d go. Still, it is why: one tall silver maple,the grain of whose pewtery bark records how the trunkarched away from the buildings and flexed up, out,and over the street, reaching for light and space.Its posture reminds me every time of Michelangelo’s Libyan Sybil,though a quick image search shows no resemblancebeyond an excuse to remember a place where I was happy.
Which brings me to Shostakovich. His advice,like most good advice, is inarguably trueand impossible to follow. Because I know how one desolating day I’ll finally come upon that treefreshly cut down, do I avoid this block, start the farewell now? No,I just forget about it, like I forget everything exceptthe next thing I need to do and maybe the thing after that, and walkanyhow, and go on finding myself there, low orange sun behind me,the non-sybil still not cut down. Time again to wonder if I so love Romeonly because I can’t live there, and what love for his childrendid to Shostakovich during the Great Terror, and how muchit has cost me to survive the violent love that is the oppositeof both pretended neglect and real neglect,and when, at long last, our Earth will have had enoughof whatever it is—call it love—that goes on cutting down moreand more of the trees it didn’t even have to plant, along with those it did.
Off-Season Beach Takeaway
You’ve got to respect it, how at first the cormorantspretend not to notice us,each one perched atopits pole, every dark-crested head nowswivellingas we approach, until,out of subtly tensing posturesand a rippling flock-wide flutter,they vault as one into flight, skimmingover wind-crisped cobalt water,west over the bay, east over the sea, away from nothingbut us—
And so what, if there’s only some mirage of a projectto stoop us down into our cool indigo shadows,scrabbling for shells that quote the sun, gold-flecked, gold-spritzed, gold-lacquer-dipped, which,chinkling for now in your pocket,will be bundled home, short-, then long-listed, perusedthe once,then bottom-drawed, unthought-of, cracked, lost,trashed—
No regrets either when, in returnfor dawdling along the braid of tidewracktwo miles farther,its fossil-white driftwood, pecked-overcrab carapaces and scribbles of kelpnot only in no way differ,but cost us that much more late-afternoon sunhard at our faces for the walkback, now that we’re walking back, since there’s no other waybut back—
Because what’s left for us at last,after retracing our pathsout onto the tidal flats,and sloshing ahead some morethrough the onward gush of the current, then just wading on pastwhile the prints of people, birds, a dog,blur under one swipe from a waveletafter another,
is to acquire,as a tempo fit for our own occurring,this fluent local rhythmof, for some time now,nothing mattering.
And so what, if there’s only some mirage of a projectto stoop us down into our cool indigo shadows,scrabbling for shells that quote the sun, gold-flecked, gold-spritzed, gold-lacquer-dipped, which,chinkling for now in your pocket,will be bundled home, short-, then long-listed, perusedthe once,then bottom-drawed, unthought-of, cracked, lost,trashed—
No regrets either when, in returnfor dawdling along the braid of tidewracktwo miles farther,its fossil-white driftwood, pecked-overcrab carapaces and scribbles of kelpnot only in no way differ,but cost us that much more late-afternoon sunhard at our faces for the walkback, now that we’re walking back, since there’s no other waybut back—
Because what’s left for us at last,after retracing our pathsout onto the tidal flats,and sloshing ahead some morethrough the onward gush of the current, then just wading on pastwhile the prints of people, birds, a dog,blur under one swipe from a waveletafter another,
is to acquire,as a tempo fit for our own occurring,this fluent local rhythmof, for some time now,nothing mattering.
A Brief Loss of Momentum
I somehow seem to be leaving my apart-ment late a lot these days, in fact pretty muchevery time. I know it’s a bad habit,but I’m OK with how it vectors me outinto this, the hive-roar of New York City,plated afresh in that alloy of purposemy oyster-shy life otherwise lacks.There’ll be no swerves. No no-you-firsts.None of the idle noticing that makes the tug of analog vistas such a nuisance.If it’s raining, as it is tonight, I’ll letthe onyx prongs of Manhattan’s overworldoutmenace the first Blade Runner’s LAall they want, so long as my trajectory can arcthrough its boulevards’ arterial spurt and throbundeflectably. Like I said, a bad habit.
So now, with ant-black traffic slithering up Third,a sift of pinpoint drizzle diffractslunar haloes from streetlamps, my cue to notethe contours of every hard thing diluted and blurred.As my privileged pace sputters out, I must registerfirst the old woman with a walker hurryingslowly across the avenue, who gets almosthalfway before the red hand starts flashing,then the homeless man, no coat, no hat,no shoes, who’s shaking a crumpled cupat a river of umbrellas plunging past.I’m crowded aside while I peer around,wondering if I really care to knowhow much of this might be other than it iswere I not of what keeps it so.Which is what I get for slowing down.
So now, with ant-black traffic slithering up Third,a sift of pinpoint drizzle diffractslunar haloes from streetlamps, my cue to notethe contours of every hard thing diluted and blurred.As my privileged pace sputters out, I must registerfirst the old woman with a walker hurryingslowly across the avenue, who gets almosthalfway before the red hand starts flashing,then the homeless man, no coat, no hat,no shoes, who’s shaking a crumpled cupat a river of umbrellas plunging past.I’m crowded aside while I peer around,wondering if I really care to knowhow much of this might be other than it iswere I not of what keeps it so.Which is what I get for slowing down.
The Silence Treatment
From beyond those shaggy pines our horizon crackles behindyou’d hear it—a kind of smothered enormous indignant bellowing,the shitstormdoing what shitstorms do—if you listened.
So don’t listen.
So don’t listen.