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]

From the beginning, The Common has brought you transportive writing and exciting new voices. We are committed to supporting writers and maintaining free, unrestricted access to our website, but we can’t do it without you. Become an integral part of our global community of readers and writers by donating today. No amount is too small. Thank you!

Shook Music

Related Posts

Cover of All Is The Telling by Rosa Castellano

An Embodied Sense of Time: Raychelle Heath Interviews Rosa Castellano

ROSA CASTELLANO
I’m holding a blank page all the time for myself. That’s a truth that I choose to believe in: the blank page is a tool for our collective liberation. It can be how we keep going. I love that we can find each other on the page and heal each other, too. So, I invoke that again and again, for myself, because I need it.

Cloudy sunset over field.

Florida Poems

EDWARD SAMBRANO III
I will die in Portland on an overcast day, / The Willamette River mirroring clouds’ / Bleak forecast and strangers not forgetting— / Not this time—designer raincoats in their closets. / They will leave for work barely in time / To catch their railcars. It will happen / On a day like today.