Six poems // Mac Goad

BASEMENT POEMS

1. SIX AM

Isn’t it ideal to write a poem?

Sky bruises dust to binary pink.

2. BACHELOR FRIDGE

O 2% expired today!

I forget I’m not machine.

Ice trays, always empty:

altar to millennial malaise?

3. THE STRAIGHT COUPLE UPSTAIRS RUN

THEIR DISHWASHER WHEN THEy FUCK

I sing. Try to trust compliments I’m given.

I scream at TV characters as if they listen.

I HATE PERFORMING BEHIND A PODIUM

Please: at least once under his blunt hands,

both of us getting off like circular narratives.

I couldn’t make up her bruising revisions,

my poems snarled beneath us in bed.

Fragment, fractal, obsession: I’ll do anything

convenient to avoid serious confessions.

“POT FOR SLEEP”

I gave up explaining “poetics” and “process”

to my psychiatrist. What does she want me to do?

Count how many times a day I get stoned?

Once. I’d love to not write about it but the drain

backs up into my sci fi rock n roll anxiety crush poems…

SHARING MY WORK

fingers in sans serif lower case virginia red clay

//

Mac Goad earned an MFA (and taught undergrads) at the University of Colorado Boulder. She spent five transcendent summers teaching poetry and songwriting to high school students at the Young Writers Workshop of the University of Virginia. As of May 2016, she’s back in her parents' house, trying to find a job and start a band. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in velvet-tail, SUSAN, and Yes, Poetry.