SOLO
What’s the first thing you do
in a house you suspect is haunted?
You sing. Singing somehow
gives you a protective refrain.
Look back over old family films
of your early candled birthdays,
who is always singing loudest?
The grand generations, now dead.
They sang as you grew up, each
year you gained height, weight
while every birthday for them
was just a diminishing return.
It ends with you singing alone
in a house on your birthday –
they are present, as always
yet you sing to ward them away.
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RICHIE McCAFFERY (b.1986) is a PhD Carnegie scholar at the University of Glasgow, researching the Scottish poets of World War Two. His poems have appeared in journals such as The Dark Horse, Magma, The Rialto and Stand as well as the anthologies Spinning Plates and Salt’s Best British Poetry 2012. His first pamphlet collection, entitled Spinning Plates, was published by HappenStance Press in March 2012.
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Read more work by Richie McCaffery:
Poem in B O D Y
HappenStance
Salt Publishing
Magma Poetry
He sang /
like a gas station on a black summer night.
you stand a long time /
by the creek, then /
feed it two pennies, /
one for you, one /
for the love /
inside you that /
you can do nothing /
with or about.
A talisman against the agony /
in his knees and hips //
for which he was taking /
black-market fentanyl
I greet your gliding flight O wings of death / But there are other signs too
realizing that the horizon is a line constituting an intersection between at least two systems, the inner and the outer one. Between an observer on the move and the roads within the landscape ...
the story / the two white women will not retract, despite the fact /
that inside each story we tell another writes itself
the intoxicating ministry of dusk, the anchor of daylight lifting, sheets white / like a freshly crushed pill, // the vortex of the body and the clap of the / coral tongue...
Before we go any further, I want to publicly acknowledge //
that I love every person in this room. I mean it. /
We’ve traveled from all over to be here, and I love /
each of you, all of you, every last one of you, except /
Harold
I tithe 10% of my new underwear to my future /
self, the one who has fallen in love.
Along one river fell /
all the luck in the world.