Becka Mara McKay
Leviticus as a Grammar for Beginners
(after the paintings of Archie Rand)
Jeanne Bessette
You think I don’t know what they say about me
behind my back? asks disaster, whose existence
might consist only of listening
to what we say behind its back. The plural
of slander is slander. The plural of money
is money.Some painters excel at depicting
disgust, memorializing each bone’s role
in the lifespan of human revulsion.
The past tense of greed. The predicate
of slander.And when we keep the words
I dare you tucked in our mouths too long,
we grow knots of muscle near our jaws. Mine
keeps me from profanity but also
from turning my face to the sea. Participle
of the unclean. Infinitive of idolatry.
Leviticus (a book to make human
anger look like a bowl of milk left outside
for barn cats) convinces me the whales
were meant to be in charge: holy breath
on the waters still the truest act
of creation. (So many restrictions
pucker and pull at the seams of the world.)
Each slanderer’s hand is a small blond wife
he won’t be permitted to divorce.
People like us never believe we can
be silenced, so the violence
of our silencing is nearly a surprise.
{BACKWARDING: From an excess of joy to mourning.]
from The Dictionary of Misremembered English
Out of obligation to the saint who holds fat stars in her palms as she peers from the sky, I replant these hibiscus every forty-eight hours to keep their smugness in check. Still they mutter insults like a thousand cursing churches. The best tyrants are the tyrants who can live below their means. Because I owe her—the saint with poor circulation who pockets the plumpest stars as she wanders the cold space of God—I let the hibiscus talk trash about me. They are such pessimistic perennials, and they speak in the barking whispers of chain smokers. Mazel tov, they croak as I pick at the soil stenciled under my nails (Yiddish is the tongue of their deepest contempt) and hasten themselves into a fierce chorus, repeating their favorite words for exile: Banished. Language. Rubbed-away gold.
[FIDICINALES: Finger muscles used to play certain musical instruments]
from The Dictionary of Misremembered English
What if recurring dreams are all one dream,
like a government of hijackers sent
to survey the mind? This is what I thought
when my mother and I cleaned out the bedroom
closet. She handed me each old notebook
with the kind of fingertip protocol
reserved for shattered china or the weightless
corpses of lizards trapped between window
and screen. I’ve given my ancient rage proper
interment, exhuming the bones of an argument
with a hapless Dairy Queen employee
in the Florida Keys over the size
of my blizzard and letting them rest.
Ars Poetica: Bad Translation
Let’s lick our thoughts from the ceiling, suggested
my hosts, who may have been Scandinavian.
Was this a metaphor for parting at the end
of an eventful evening? A salute
to a Dadaist party game? But then I saw
the stepladder and the paintbrushes
and the food coloring, and my hosts’ tongues
already slick and green as chameleons.
The stepladder seemed rickety and uninspired,
and I could not tell whether I’d be offered help
balancing as I stretched my face to meet
the words. Nor was it clear whether the words
were made from sugar or from salt. If this is you
speaking, disaster, I get the message. I will gather
forgiveness like a gleaner after the harvesting,
bending to my task in the corners of the fields.
Becka Mara McKay directs the Creative Writing MFA at Florida Atlantic University. Her chapbook of prose poems, Happiness Is the New Bedtime, was published in 2016 by Slash Pine Press. Other publications include a book of poetry, A Meteorologist in the Promised Land (Shearsman), and several translations of fiction and poetry from Modern Hebrew. Her work can be found in recent or forthcoming issues of Colorado Review, Cream City Review, Interim, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares and Forklift, Ohio.