Shook Music

By LESLIE MCGRATH

 

Follow me, Imagineers! We’ll make noise

from these dread instruments, shook music

loud as the hell we’ve climbed from, visible

only to the i in piano, the eye in the oboe.

 

We’ll hoist a cheesecake by an iron hook

and swing blindly at it with our puny claws.

We’ll howl under its influences, meet cute

fuck, and forget before the trembling’s done.

 

Once finished, we’ll flame out, God or no.

Still, we’ll take our dead with us, our legions

with us, and because there’s always

room for piety, our greatness with us.

 

Leslie McGrath is the author of Opulent Hunger, Opulent Rage, a poetry collection, and the forthcoming Out From the Pleiades: a picaresque novella in verse.

[Click here to purchase your copy of Issue 07]

Shook Music

Related Posts

Caroline M. Mar Headshot

Waters of Reclamation: Raychelle Heath Interviews Caroline M. Mar

CAROLINE M. MAR
That's a reconciliation that I'm often grappling with, which is about positionality. What am I responsible for? What's coming up for me; who am I in all of this? How can I be my authentic self and also how do I maybe take some responsibility?

October 2024 Poetry Feature: New Poems By Our Contributors

NATHANIEL PERRY
Words can contain their opposite, / pleasure at once a freedom and a ploy— / a garden something bound and original / where anything, but certain things, should thrive; / the difference between loving-kindness and loving / like the vowel shift from olive to alive.