Matt McBride: 3 Poems

The Party

We spent years alone
selecting the correct glassware.

At each curb,
clothing piles,

going malignant in rain.
“Before,” extending

like an asphalt lot.
In dreams, someone keeps

handing us a pillowcase
of horse hooves.

A soft dial tone
scores the days.

Bricked shoeboxes
with roses cut from paper

we add to nightly.
The people on television

hold poster boards of
what they were supposed to say

standing in an empty studio.

The Party

Outside, white
as airplane paint.

​Inside, trailer-home carpet
brown. Glitter sheds

off every object; rain
pianoing against siding.

She looks beautiful
in her closet’s dresses.

A cover song plays,
the bridge carried

by more and more instruments;
the chorus running out of singers.

Mostly, I stranger.
Everything becomes less so—

there being no good way
to cut a pill in half.

The Party

Each room
its player pianos.
What used to be a hospital,
full of them. 
A sky colored-in
early ’90s.
I’m tired of being
tired of being tired
of being alive.
All keys are fingers.
Some numbers must be imaginary.
I ghost so much
my laundry’s all sheets;
my face just a stain
on my face.
Every finger has at least one rule
for what it’s supposed to touch.
Each player piano
playing a heartbeat
as I pretend this panic attack
is a dance I just invented.

Matt McBride's work has previously appeared or is forthcoming from Court Green, Cream City Review, Diagram, FENCE, Guernica, Mississippi Review, Ninth Letter, [PANK], Packingtown Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and Typo among others. His first book, City of Incandescent Light, was published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018. Currently, he is an instructor in the English department as well the interdisciplinary MFA program at Wilson College. He can be found online at mattmcbridepoetry.com.