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Mekeel McBride

Mekeel McBride is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently The Deepest Part of the River (Carnegie Mellon, 2001). She is professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. She has received two NEA fellowships.

Author

Friend Blue Snake

Light, far away, faltering like a votive at the feet of a blue saint who blesses only the most lost of causes. The man and woman on a dark path walk home wordlessly as if it were an ordinary evening. But it is the time of the moon fat with maggots; [...]

Some Kisses for Bill

* A shooting star-that spine of light- sudden in darkness. The lost child starting its search for the body grief robbed it of. This kiss, the abandoned body returned whole. * A kiss as gold and clumsy and glad as the way tubas woo wind through Sousa [...]

Dreaming Space Awake

For a while, he stashes Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour in his mail sack and in each short stretch between apartments, squirrels and winter-weary shrubs- he reads a fenceless, stateless, still-forested America back into place. Between your house and mine [...]

City Sky Line Painted on A Blind Eye

Just before November, young woman bending over, mending you can't see what. Straight from the nuns, Catholic kid, at a black sewing machine, old fashioned kind. Blind crow pecking path-edge for star crumbs the children dropped before they disappeared [...]

Jimmy, Jesus and the Japanese Beetles

Winter 2004 | Poetry

The five kids, their parents, the grandmother and Jesus sit down to dinner. Pink, dry flakes of canned salmon lie on the plastic plates like eczema. New burns, from the day's ironing rise like small roses on the grandmother's wrists. Because they h [...]

Night Story: Window …

Winter 2004 | Poetry

Last night, Jimmy was still alive. Thin as a kid in his soft green robe. Everyone happy to help. I figured he'd made it onto the new medicine in time. You were cooking a big pot of shrimp for friends and nurses. Our friend Kishio had just drawn the J [...]