Owen McLeod
The Republic
The world of The End is near: pale men
in blue suits replace redwoods with tree-sized
Burger King balloons, tile the valley of Yosemite
with Arctic Fresh gum, make a digital billboard
of the moon. Hey, do you remember waking up
in a white-cloaked wood, ill-equipped and numb,
the flap of our cheap-ass tent frozen shut?
I was content to sleep in and screw, but you,
who would not be denied the sunrise, thawed
the zipper with your breath & OMG the light!
Now we’re at this Exxon, you in the passenger seat
scrolling through tweets, me watching gas pump TV.
I need you to say it’ll be okay and mean not good
or bad but bittersweet, the way it seems to God
if there is a God. Even if there isn’t, isn’t the idea
almost enough? I know old Plato was big on ideas:
The Beautiful, The Good, The River, The Tree.
These days I pray there are such things, eternal
and pristine, like far away stars we can almost see
beyond the glare of the dead moon’s messaging.
We’d wake up there in the ideal tent, unzip
the old skin, and fly, perfected, to The Sun.
Owen McLeod's poems have recently found homes in 32 Poems, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. His first book of poems won the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and will be published in 2019.
Return to March 2018 Edition
The world of The End is near: pale men
in blue suits replace redwoods with tree-sized
Burger King balloons, tile the valley of Yosemite
with Arctic Fresh gum, make a digital billboard
of the moon. Hey, do you remember waking up
in a white-cloaked wood, ill-equipped and numb,
the flap of our cheap-ass tent frozen shut?
I was content to sleep in and screw, but you,
who would not be denied the sunrise, thawed
the zipper with your breath & OMG the light!
Now we’re at this Exxon, you in the passenger seat
scrolling through tweets, me watching gas pump TV.
I need you to say it’ll be okay and mean not good
or bad but bittersweet, the way it seems to God
if there is a God. Even if there isn’t, isn’t the idea
almost enough? I know old Plato was big on ideas:
The Beautiful, The Good, The River, The Tree.
These days I pray there are such things, eternal
and pristine, like far away stars we can almost see
beyond the glare of the dead moon’s messaging.
We’d wake up there in the ideal tent, unzip
the old skin, and fly, perfected, to The Sun.
Owen McLeod's poems have recently found homes in 32 Poems, FIELD, New England Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review, and elsewhere. His first book of poems won the 2018 Vassar Miller Prize in Poetry and will be published in 2019.
Return to March 2018 Edition