Poetry By Robert McDonald

Dr. Matthias Ripp CC




Heaven’s Coast

The deathbed
scene
in Mark Doty’s memoir, I’d read it
a half-dozen times

through the years, but 
never,
I realized, never
when I knew

what it was to be
at the side
of the dying: 
My father’s

thin    
arm, his smooth
hand, the terrible
day-long 

rasp
of breath, the stop,
and then
the cooling. And never,

until now, having my own
beloved, the man
currently
two rooms

away, assembling
a chair. I wept,
then, for the long book
of losses, for the full shelves

of memoirs, and how
a sunset
cracks open 

the violet
hinge
in the sky 
that leads 
to the pages of night.






Go Ahead Chrysanthemums

and break my heart open 
all over again. I’ve not forgotten, 
October, that you 
are the last season my mother 
was alive and asking
for her breakfast.
It’s the brilliancy, 
chrysanthemums. Why
did we plant 
you on the back deck, 
one story
up, so you could blaze
in spite or most especially because 
of this dark morning, after a night
of biblical deluge, the sky not yet cleared 
or recovered, our window box plantings
battered, pleats of fluttered greenery 
surrounding 
your cabbagey blossoms; I want
to take one rust-colored flower
in my mouth
like a pill 
that will make me 
imagine new doors to and from
this same stupid world, that will
make me feel this autumn light
as something other
than a knife
of loss—chrysanthemums, when
did you turn from the sadness 
of the seasons 
into my specific grief? 

Oh you gathering of autumn moons, when
did you become the hard
absence
of my mother? I could open
this sliding glass door.
I could walk right out, I could drop
this pen, set aside
my notebook, push my beard
into one hundred of your
rain-soaked faces.

​
​

Robert McDonald’s first book of poems, "A Streetlight That's Been Told It Used to Be the Moon," is coming from Roadside Press in 2026. His work has appeared in Does It Have Pockets, Painted Bride Quarterly, The Marrow, Gyroscope, Tabula Rasa Review, and The Madrid Review, among others. He lives with his husband in Chicago.