Cameron McGill

Primogeniture

I open the shed door, pull the tarp from the work bench,

put the radio on and place the garbage at the roadside.

Moonlight like a fawn crosses the county road,

its shoulder littered with tallboys in the rain.

A man on the news says, Your job doesn’t pay;

your job is to stay alive. Should I listen for Chopin

or the waves, or watch the green eye of a level

rust a lifetime on the head of a nail?

Two hundred feet below me where sleep lives,

my mother has a nightmare. In his kindest act,

my father sings her back to sleep.

It rains harder; I stay there a long time.

Twenty-seven bones at work in the human hand

when I scratch a match on the door and light the lamp.

I’ll carry it through the woods

to the house, as if it were my firstborn.

Love/No Love

In the quiet corner of the garden,

the cilantro has gone to seed. In August’s heat,

each small flower a face with a yellow mouth

asking for water, for wind, and for next season

to leave its door cracked at dawn.

I watch you watering the strawberries,

the soft arc becoming the last prism of summer.

A dream, like an ocean liner, departs your eyes.

Today is my birthday. I know it’s over

in this backyard as crows pick at sour cherries,

and the sun, like a failed parachute,

drops out of the sky over Lynn Street

and into the dark sleep that sunflowers sleep.

Cameron McGill is a poet, educator, and songwriter from Champaign, Illinois. He is the author of In the Night Field (Augury Books/Brooklyn Arts Press) and the chapbook Meridians (Willow Springs Books). His work is forthcoming or has appeared in The Kenyon Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, The American Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland, and Blackbird. In 2022, he released his seventh studio album, The Widow Cameron. He teaches in the MFA program at Western Colorado University and is Associate Professor at Washington State University, where he co-directs the Visiting Writers Series.

Artwork: “Sleep” by Daniel Lurie

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