Arrow

The wind does a dance. We don’t pay attention,
it has no partner—everything, everything has
arrows in it. Hello, market, how big you are!
You have certainly eaten all of your green beans,
you have certainly nearly slaked your thirst
with all the proteins of the air and the dirt.
I am here to greet you, though I awake
to find myself surrounded by spent booster rockets
and I too am spent. Nevertheless! I steer
a cup of coffee into the wind, what a lantern
and it is going to be a day with many sentences
in it and in this way it is a jigsaw
puzzle. Not also. Simultaneously. Look
at this market snap its suspenders
and grin! I will do quite a lot of coughing
though less than yesterday. There is
an arrows in that even: in every gesture, in every
spill you can feel it, flex and the sunglasses sit
crooked on your heart, this is the television show
of my breathing, I can see the market from here
and I fear that this is the part of the show
where sleep comes involuntarily, Oh no! leaks a mouth
not quite mine—I have been shot! but perhaps
I will land somewhere innocuous, trembling slowly
toward stillness, perhaps I will not hurt
too much.

Marc McKee received his MFA from the University of Houston and his PhD from the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he lives with his wife, Camellia Cosgray. Recent work appears in Handsome, Copper Nickel, New South and Artifice. He is the author of a chapbook, What Apocalypse? (New Michigan Press, 2008) and a full-length collection, Fuse (Black Lawrence Press, 2011).