Poetry by Mack Gregg

              ​Bill Tyne CC




FOUNDING FATHER
 
Father died with his lungs full of language. Right before he died I managed to say, I miss you. Into the phone his wife held up to his mouth, he wheezed an almost inaudible, I miss me, too.
 
When cleaning out his office, I come upon his label maker. It makes words by punching white letters into sticky tape of different colors. I drop it and dislodge the letters slightly, so their edges are marked by the ghosts of other letters.
 
I am not usually like this. I am usually so careful to handle the objects in the right way. I cry to the side of the manuscript, into the receptacle the librarians have designated. So that it doesn’t overflow, I am careful to regularly empty it into the General Pool of Tears. As the rules indicate. 
 
As a child, I witnessed murder after murder and eventually did nothing. Eventually, I didn’t even cry. Instead I practiced smiling and waving from the top of my float in the parade: Elbowelbow Wristwrist.
 
In order to learn to cry again, I had to become a historian. I had to sculpt a face that could appear on various lanyards, allowing me to touch old paper. Only then could I feel my fingers. What a relief, to stop the parade music. Nevertheless, I still hear it, the horn section.
 
Kerry James Marshall’s Heirlooms and Accessories (2002) depicts photographs of the white women who watched lynchings, smilingly, altered digitally to appear as if inside lockets.
 
The labelmaker comes with most of the punctuation except for question marks.
 
In the elevator, the ladies at the nursing home asked Father if I was his son. “No?” he asked.
 
I always thought it was unusual that Mother married Father, her boyfriend’s brother, but it turns out everyone in Iowa hands their ex-girlfriends down to the next-in-line brother. My family likes to keep it in the family.
 
When I was a child, Father trained me to be an accessory. He stuck ARM CANDY on my forehead. Although I peeled it off years ago, strangers sometimes still lick me there.
 
MOVIES IN WHICH FATHER LOSES CONTROL:
Honey, I Shrunk The Kids
The Fly
The Incredible Shrinking Man
The Shining
 
Whenever I’ve gone missing, Father has found me.
 
The labelmaker is available on Ebay for 6.99. The Children have just logged on and started a bidding war in real time. They’ve decided to buy up every last label-maker in the world. Why do you like this so much better than writing on your phones? I ask them. Because its useful, they tell me. Together, they use the labelmaker to write a collaborative poem. Quickly, the places where it insufficiently presses a letter, its analog glitches, its divergences, become more exciting than when it works correctly. Look how this letter didn’t punch right! Look how this machine writes toward its own disappearance!
 
PUNCHING               ALLOWED
 
A LOUD                                                                EPITAPH                                                                           OF ITSELF
 
Use the machine to name things what they aspire to become. I label my computer screen BROTH
 
Punch out four lines in green, peel and stick them on my laptop-back just so. Opaque, they hide the glowing Apple.™
 
A gold pocket watch, inscribed with faces of various generations of Iowans. On the watch face, a white mother dotes over her son, my great (great?) grandfather. It actually burns my hand. My Children don’t want to touch it either. No thanks they looks up from their phones We just saged ourselves this morning.
 
I recite the four green lines until my throat goes dry:
 
             We’re all writers or gone. Missing
             From the world like we never happened
             To have a skin. Only some unhappy wind
             Passing through[1]
 
This recitation is how I am not-gone
 
Through me in waves of sound, slowing my heart, a quiet epigraph that hazards the beginning of a mind. My best guest.
 
Never to have happened, unless
 
The poet puts a toe in, troubles the pronoun. This we is contingent and partial, as is my relation. As are my relations. The we is a fractured joint but the I is even less.
 
My eyes follow the ripples across the surface of the Black Pool of Thought.[2]
 
What I see reflected in the surface is vague, disappears when I look directly. I try various medicines to keep my vision blurred. I even try looking away, once or twice, but all I see around me is a static screen made of maggots.
 
They are eating a corpse, the white maggots. My Children are Hungry. Their names are Candy and Candy and Candy and Candy and Candy and Candy and--
 
The period between gone and missing haunts me. I don’t want all that death.
 
1)     A golden harp tuned to the key of depression.

2)     Unhappy intimates accident, the vicissitudes of circumstance as the condition of living—our survival is an accident—is it a happy one?

3)     The line break between “happened/To have:” like a 15-minute break in an 8-hour shift, when you sit on the floor of the fluorescent closet and massage your feet. After the break, the “To have” is a rebirth: a breath into a new possible, a little life held. Never to have had a skin is also hopeful? The ketamine dream of being disembodied.

4)     What is it to “have happened” as a we? Putting a toe in. Troubling history.
​
5)     Passing through: transition haunts
 
​
The labelmakers arrive in the mail. They fill the house. And that’s it: The Novel is finally finished.
 
Father drowns out my crying with Fox News.
 
Now I’m swimming in a river of sage-smoke. Lethean, it rightly drowns me. Now I’m in the underworld and no. I do not want a bite of your Apple.
 
Now I’m Nicholas Cage in National Treasure and I’m going to steal an invaluable document. If only I could remember my name, or why I’m here.  All I know is, do not eat the fruit.
 
Tropical plants keep growing out from between my laptop keys. I snap it shut. This is not supposed to be Jumanji.
 
Hey, I’ve been lost down here, eating only the opera of philodendra & the leather of old books, which I’ve boiled in heated tears to make them palatable. I opened the book wrong and then I was in the basement. Something is pursuing me. I owe so many fines. All my fines and all my ancestors fines and my ancestors ancestors fines. The librarian tells me that’s why they left England: because of the fines. We have so many dead people’s hair to get out of.
 
I turn around and I see the ghost who’s been pursuing me. It’s the body-shaped maggots again. I label it FOUNDING FATHER. It shrinks until it could fit inside a tiny box, then turns into nothing. I’ve been digging through its little clippings. Turns out, it invented a new kind of rose. It painted nude boys on the walls of its locked room. It even venerated its lover into a saint, not that any of this matters, given everything we now know.
 
 
 
 
 [1] Cameron Awkward Rich, Dispatch
[2] Fred Moten: All thought is Black thought
 


​
 

 
TRANS/VERSE
                                                                                                                                       For the moths
 
I bring myself up
by hand. I have
to do it
 
inverse; parent
myself. First:
 
I list my traits & the traits of my god. The point is to find,
the book says, meaning in my life, step
 
by step. A generous reader, I
 
                  fascinate
 
                  myself
 
like a moth. This buzzing fluorescence is not
without purpose, but its glimmer isn’t
 
the moon’s. I inherit
 
the moth’s broken
 
                 navigational instinct
 
                             open the window, and Google
           
                             why are we drawn to light
 
hit
the Nat Geo paywall, then compelled
 
to enter my email, address
to gain admission; is this
 
another porchlight
or a revealing
                                                           analogy
                                                                       
                                                                             (is there a word for a metaphor
                                                                             which, if you burrow in
                                                                                                                                                           deep enough, illuminates
                                                                              the way out--
                                                                                                                          carries through
                                                                                                                                                                                                   --I have   
                                                                                                                                                                                                   my doubts)
 
                                                             In school                    
 
they teach (of course) of the horse—no
not the horse—the horse is what I draw
 
in the margins, perfect/quarter/horse. I take
the bus. I wish my dad would write a note
 
so I could get off at my girlfriend’s house.
Humping my pillow, thinking of Plato,
 
me shackled to her shackled to her shackled to her
and behind us, a fire, casting the image.
 
The hottest part: I cannot turn my head.
On leaving the cave, though, I don’t know--
 
I never trust a shortcut.
 
 
                                                                       
                    Transverse Orientation: a moth’s navigation system, based on the light of the moon
 
 
 
In an 1890 essay, “The Last Song
of the Swan,” Helena Blavatsky prophesied
 
the end of the world, taking the new craze
of electric lighting as the swan song
 
of civilization. In what was both
an observation of content and of form,
 
she wrote of currents of electricity
passing through bodies in tandem,
 
a pandemic circuit
of fatal contact.
 
From The Morning Post (Jan 21, 1890):
               Another fatal accident, arising from the
                  System of overhead electric
                  Lighting wires is reported today from
                  Newburgh, New York State. It appears
                  That a horse while being driven along
                  Touched an iron awning-post
                  With his nose, and fell down as
                  If dead. A man, who rushed to
                  Assist in raising the animal, touched
                  The horse’s head-stall and immediately
                  Dropped dead, and another man
                  Who attempted to lift the first, received
                  A terrible shock.
 
When we were young, we’d hold hands
as Kyle or Tim gripped the cow fence
 
to catch a thrill. In this way
we saved each other, lessening
 
the impact by finishing the circuit.
When Tim or Kyle fell asleep driving and plowed
 
into a ditch I never thought to ask
if he’d been drinking, but of course, we were all
 
drinking, all of us, raising the animal.
None of us were supposed to live
 
like this. Modernity by nature messes up
systems, our coding, such that the moths go
 
full Icarus & burn up in the false light,
orientation hacked. Blavatsky wrote
 
on account of the moths.
The moth is not a metaphor
 
but a metonymy, a link in the
chain (not the Great Chain (of being)
 
a link in the relay of fleshy animate
things absorbing the blow.
 
Some days I feel like the horse.
 
Today,
I write small, big, the bliss or the pain of the present
 
with only the vague awareness of my destination, 
Like the dream I had of walking away from the party,
 
away from somewhere without knowing where
I was going next. At the party they were trying
 
to sell me a timeshare in a horse. I knew it
would take me at full gallop. I knew, if it fell,
 
I’d die trying to save it, my horse, and also
Someone else’s. I needed to clear out the blockage,
 
to swallow the medicine, release the winged thing beating
against the back of my throat and wanting out.
           
In line for security a child points and laughs
at the dead body of a swallow; the mother
 
laughs too, relieved death’s on the other side
of the window. To know words like “window,” “death,”
 
and the difference between a lamp and the
real moon is to be human. I wonder if
 
the birds laugh back at our broken navigation
paths, our security line woven by acts
 
of mass death, hijacked by the x-ray
through which we are willingly exposed
 
to death so we can get to where we’re going,
arms raised like wings overhead. The TSA
 
agent, seeing deeper inside me than any
lover, is yawning. Now, he’s flustered,
 
asking, do you want a man or a woman
to pat you down? a woman, I answer, because
 
of my thing for cops. Thank god there are still
things they cannot x-ray, our little
 
maladaptations or adaptations, which,
in a dying world amount to the same
 
thing. Now that we’ve figured out how the system works,
whenever we get hurt, its on purpose.
 
 
 
 
 
                        Six traits:
 
1.     As a trans object ™  I sustain
 
                   3x the amount of radiation                      three times I pass through, first as a man, then as a woman, then
 
2.     As a white subject ™  I sustain
 
                   1/3 the amount of radiation                of         cancer rates                  very low in my family               our land, our bodies,     
                                                                                      property,                        unfracked        & allowed                                                        to roam like this
 
3.     In school I was never good at math, but at work
I was a nimble counter of change        one of the only times I have ever been at peace               when I sat        locked in a closet                               
            counting cash                fingers numbed           by the work                 stained             by dirt             unperceived                by anyone as if I      
        
was                  my counting                                                                 and that was all                        a body composed                     of neat stacks

                                of twenty-five ones      a body              that added up               to the same thing
                                every time                                I counted
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Mack Gregg is a Ph.D Candidate in English at UC Riverside (Cahuilla land). Their work appears in Hot Pink Magazine, b l u s h, Pom Pom Press, Boshemia Magazine, and elsewhere. They aspire to be a vessel.