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3 poems by Louis McKee

STATE’S WITNESS

Maybe I was talking too much.
Maybe I let it slip–

I knew somebody,
somebody who could get things done.

St. Brigid, go gcuidímid.
I guess I used to say it,

dropping names, and I heard
this one from my grandmother;

she was from the old country
and knew things, a lot

more than anyone knew: St Brigid…
and yeah, I said it,

said she could help me–
and then she said something, but

I wasn’t thinking at the time,
didn’t realize what it meant.

“Could she make someone’s dick
fall off?” I thought she was joking.

It was only later when I remembered
how she complained, how often

she talked about her husband–
it was clear that she wasn’t happy.

When I read about him in the paper
I just didn’t put it together–

two plus two, you know.  St Brigid–
I never heard before of a dick falling off.

THE SACRED HEART
–for the police report

Copper pipes–that’s all
they took. All they wanted.
The big-screen, the stereo,

all the rest just a short walk
out the broken back door,
where they must have parked

in clear view of the neighbors,
but they weren’t interested.
Or they were just in a hurry.

There is a list I put together
while I was waiting, things
I wish they’d taken, but no

such luck. That picture there,
for example, the god-awful
thing leaning in the corner;

that hung for forty years,
a bloody scar on the wall
of my mother’s living room.

I could never bring myself
to throw it out. Can I say it
was among the things taken?

But apparently they only wanted
copper. It’s just not my day
And for what? A couple,

three, four dollars an ounce?

“TO BE—”

I think about suicide, too,
three times a day,

at least, but
long ago

I realized what
I would be missing,

and topping the list
was orange juice,

and, well, that’s all
I needed to know.

I still think of suicide;
nothing’s changed,

but it’s the o.j.,
three times a day,

at least, that
keeps me going.

–

Louis McKee has poems recently or forthcoming in APR, Free Lunch, Paterson Poetry Review, 5 A.M., Chiron Review, Verse Wisconsin, and Nerve Cowboy, among others. River Architecture, a book of selected poems, was published in 1999, and a collection of newer work, Near Occasions of Sin, appeared in 2006. More recently, Adastra Press has published Marginalia, a volume of his translations from Old Irish monastic poems. Still Life, a chapbook of poems, has recently been issued from FootHills, and Jamming, a prize winner, from TLOLP. His 1987 collection, No Matter, was republished by Seven Kitchens Press in July 2011.