Jeffrey McDaniel
July 16, 2026
I am both the cow / and the man getting under the cow // and kissing its breasts / I’m the hamburger // and also the person / eating the hamburger
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I am both the cow / and the man getting under the cow // and kissing its breasts / I’m the hamburger // and also the person / eating the hamburger
I am both the cow / and the man getting under the cow // and kissing its breasts / I’m the hamburger // and also the person / eating the hamburger
the presence /of a certain something in the room. Three men, / two beds—how they sleep in shifts, / soundly but with, perhaps, a certain disregard for protocol.
Watching them, my heart softens / like an old potato. Something crumples // the room’s emptiness and flings it away
The tiny animal skeletons make sounds, / the sound of bone on bone, / chimes of hollow sound.
No you didn’t; you watched them grow and assigned plaudits to / yourself. I’m not going to give you garlands.
Biffed it. // Boarded, in distress, a trans-Atlantic flight, / bleated from a phrasebook, that or this, / that or this. Overpacked a spliff.
What’s the pillar meant to bear the weight of? / What terrible incarnations of the public will be invited to celebrate? / I don’t miss you. That’s the first sign I’m free.
This morning a news story: For four years, // a woman thought she was venerating // a statue of Buddha, // when actually it was a Shrek action figure
Little here has gone as planned. On the seventh day / I tacked Piss Christ over my desk like a Catholic faggot / even though I am, on technicality, neither.
I know history through my ancestors’ wounds — / I have seen what happens / when language becomes a ledger.
and when you say it’s in the quiet times / the enormity of what’s happening / floods over you, I invent / storms of bioluminescence…
Would it now be considered insensitive to refer to a Scandinavian / person as The Ice Man? I dunno, but back then it was fine.
Even with my long term connections, no one ever called / me babe, hun, or worse, dear. Sometimes they’d say Tony. / Other times they just started talking and I knew the words / were meant for me…
The flat, diaphanous mountain seemed to have formed / the way an image takes shape in a poet’s mind, / and the moon rode its shoulder like a cat…
Together we lower her. / Her head flops in first, like a turn in sleep; / we arrange the paws under and wordlessly / scatter dirt. I reach for a spade.
I listened all morning to the raven’s knock / though that is a lie. / I listened for maybe two minutes. / Maybe one.
She’s given to me, the dragonfly, / a quiet comma in the air, she hovers / as the grasslight blows into her eyes, / still as if holding to a single point.
“From now until the end of time, / I’ll sing this song — so listen, listen: / between my wings it’s, oh, so empty”
“You think / partings are simple– / one gets on the train / the other lies down on the tracks”
“My damp words fall to the floor, / lifeless and unwanted, / where they sizzle on the smoldering / embers of her grammar”
“Behind his back he hears a sound he expected: / the footsteps he remembers from a distant past”
“Not a pocket, but a little window, inward, backward, don’t look,/ child, such terrible things happened there…”
“I am used to dying, / and waking up — a new woman, / with no name, no past, / only the taste of blood in my mouth.”
“people drink sweet coffee at the market / listening to wistful Sevdalinka songs /and just like me leave the house / with a phone in their pocket / instead of a gun”
“And look, those books on the shelf / have really turned their backs on us”
“I come out / of the cathedral with dirty hands. / I touched all the marble / to see if it / was real or painted”
“I leant over the well / and asked the water./ ‘Why am I here?’ / ‘Come down, I’ll tell you,’ it replied. “
He looks around for / a fire, a tragedy, police, / so early on a Monday morning / when the world seems / a brittle and fragile place.
God this poetry’s made me so horny / it’s made me forget my own existence
A monster is never something from the future / despite the lingering fear you might become one.
I take my leave of mother, she gives me / a key, but there is / no key, only her hand stretching out / and the goodbye
I read something— / an idea worth noting, / and when I dog-eared the / page it bent easily / along the memory / of the previous crease, / someone else’s moment of / clarity
And in the end we are happy only when everything pauses,
and the fullness of the world fits
into the flutter of a curtain in wind
You say utterance is when word becomes law, is held or holds itself in the air like an accident of heaven.
When I told my mother she has dementia, / she said that of course she’d get dementia / because her mom had Alzheimer’s but // she doesn’t have that yet because she remembers
there is no time for tears, there never is; / no time for breathing deep. / A fit of sadness is like pulling a door that says push, / again and again, into eternity
An old man has been blocking my view. / Get out! I shout. He shouts it back. // I open my mouth. He inspects my teeth, / ducks out of view.
The big one was launched at dawn. Doesn’t matter / who sent it. Soon there will be others, / enough missiles to blanket the sky. I’m with you now, / under a willow, next to a pond, a crow is perched / on a rock hunting worms.
I know this silence / by heart, willed stillness, rotten // moon pulling itself through / the cavity of window.
There was nothing I could have done / about the life I was born into. / It was waiting for me, and I slipped into it / like a man waking up in a dream.
Even the curve of a conch shell / goes forever inward to an ending / too small for us to see. I put my ear / to it and hear Do not disturb my circles
My mother / paid for groceries one dollar bill / at a time. When I left home // she lost a third of her aid.
If our parents were here, they would already have sent us to bed. / And once again, I wouldn’t notice that it’s my younger brother / with whom I’m having the longest relationship of my life.
The big story is the old dog dying slowly, / half her mouth working tender bits / she is hand fed, strokes or tumor / or both, unsettling her stomach. / The big story, her good days, little one / her bad.
I dreamt kindness to animals was widespread, / Their demand on our powers greater and still greater. // If a rope broke, we released the herd. / If a drop of rain fell, we unveiled a flock of birds.
I know my neighbours by their walk. / Our walls are thin. A sort of string / between two cans, our stack of floors. / I hold it to my ear. It sings.
You can’t say he failed to choose a path in life, failed to make the sacrifice of choosing because there was nothing for him to choose at that time.
I took my nails into my thighs and smiled. I looked at your hands on the steering / wheel, drumming. I willed them to swerve us all into a tragedy tasting of concrete. / I suddenly saw myself in another ten years, still sitting there, humming.
no one cared, not then, not now, still what got lost & when, on the snowy side of a street, cold buildings cold book in hand inscribed in colored pencil no myth but those imagined & those at best misunderstood
A dog bites down on a stick of dynamite and takes off running. They are going to explode together. Imagine: making someone feel like that, making them lose their mind like that.
Such an itch you are / man I don’t quite know // all the things you might say / if we were on your terrace / with a beer
From a very young age my star stopped shining. / And among the many battles between life and death, / I discovered, I think by chance, the meaning of life.
He wishes he could experience the transition to evening / less like a hungry moth flapping its dust towards the magnetic / pools of light, more like a rare edition in the hands of tiny / librarians
Is this the murderer, or the wee nyaff / that kicks the hippocampus when I’m tired? / And should I yell or let it wander off, / my crisis just a detail on the ward / that nobody will log, unless I call?
Dear Bill: I’m sorry to hear you’re dead. / You hated the fig-leaf euphemisms / Of pulpit-jockeys who peddle heavens, / So you’d like me calling this spade a spade: // I died a bit myself, when I heard.
When the man in the row behind me / starts shouting that he wants off this plane, / I start thinking / how I’m not really in the mood to die today.
a lot of parenting is getting the first child to play / with the second child / so you don’t have to do it
Because we like flowers close to us we hold them / a little longer than their natural cycles. / See these four-hundred-year-old honeysuckles /
in Herrick’s poems. How his rhymes enfold them.
I can paint phrases that capture my man / veiled and leaning over a hive, ungloved hands / lifting frames aswarm with bees, finding the queen
There was a space at the table / for a child who’s face I’d already seen. / Who had arrived with a smile in the shape / of a blade. I composed a psalm because / I longed to make up a story that wasn’t true
sometimes a bottle // holds me like a tentpole / sometimes // it’s the other way round; and we bottle- /
neck / we flagship each-other.
Wine river of melted crowns / calls me home from the forest. // On the bank I drift, I mark / my bright axe laid down to rest.
My strangeness as unsavable / as the herd / on the other side of this wall / that will, at a single sound, run full tilt / into oncoming headlights
I am learning what men do and why they do it. Today, my father / teaches me fear. Mother watches from the house. I watch as if I am outside // myself
It’s something about the goats. / When I go to see them, they rush / to the side of the pen where I stand
those days won’t come back but at least we don’t have to talk in complete sentences now
Your laughter. / It seems so harmless. / A roof made of boulders. /
Things inside your body that have never gotten out.
When the rain slowed, I walked the dog / from whom I wrested one bottlecap, one shoe. // Clicked on a link to a network of bail funds, / found my country, my state. Hovered.
See if anyone is / watching. No one is // watching. The water laps / around you like applause.
Nobody wants to hear a white guy going on about / the black people he has known, especially not / a white guy who hasn’t known many black people
Role play is harder / alone in the hotel room, / it being more difficult / to suspend disbelief / single-handedly.
And because I was not good, I did not step inside / the ark. The flood came and went and my body, // in rebuke of the enemy, became one with ground.
What is there / but great silence, waiting, / and serving time in the body / before returning home
We called it chemo brain—forgetting the names / of people, places, familiar objects
At the theater we recognize the movie is us. / All kinds of awful things are happening. / The ocean has covered houses so they barely stick out / like broken teeth.
We remember, wrapped in black ropes that swayed / me, a cradlesong in the embrace of the snake, / our hearts cracked to cast together better.
Once, a teacher / told me—Need is a bad word. She // stood in front of the class, frowning / at its long ‘e’ sound, as a mother // might frown at her young child / who’s just peed her pants.
I’m five years old / again, refusing to wear Bermuda / shorts, begging mom to buy only / long pants, long enough to hide / my iron brace
For instance, I cup my hand over his heart / and it’s like a hand over a heart. // For instance, outside a couple of / night birds / are singing like birds singing at night. // It’s beautiful enough / to name this world —
You can’t recreate the first taste of an orange. Which is not just sunshine, bright and radiant, bursting in a mouth but the shock of it and the moment just before the peel, the seal is broken. Every orange after chases memory.
I am a bird. I have a cloaca. Piss/shit/eggs rush out / the one hole. Cock goes in that hole too.
they have her anyway, laugh about it in the locker rooms, student / center, and physical science room, hawking globs of tobacco on the / tile
Shopping center. A boy of about six trailing his parents—skinny kid with tousled hair, three of them heading toward their car.
“If we weren’t in this parking lot I’d slap the shit out of you,” the mother says to the boy.
The / brute of war engorges man / and beast, the clash of iron / on steel makes loud / even the less-endowed organ.
My body opens like a highway sinkhole. It’s a baby someone shouts and I know they are wrong. It’s a baby I shout, still wrong.
We’ve worked / for this / intimacy—
/ me, letting go / of my need / to know, // you, trusting me / to let you / be.
Why do they want to see pictures / of what they looked away from / in disgust?
People never want to leave the party, do they? Drinks full, lips / red, lies told to the point of truth. We’re waiting out the silence.
I’m a fair sacrifice. Steel tools pass in and out of me / like parishioners through the threshold / of a heavy door. My flesh holds too much / that I cannot see.
The street was quiet. A dog pissed on my motorbike chain / & I waved away the smell with my hand. / I got home, I gathered up my cat Zelda, / we listened to Leonard Cohen “One of Us Cannot Be Wrong” …
this toddler toddles up to my table / and says Hi over and over, like fifty times, / or maybe he’s saying high because honestly / he’s behaving like a meth head who just got / out of a mental hospital
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