ERECTOR THEORY(PDF)
Foreword
Before the Election
Dyson Sphere
Monolith
Some Boomer Just Posted
Providence
Fig Eater
It's Never Going Away, It's Never Going Back
Salome Is Napping
Sea Wall
Incognito
Those movies have it wrong—
technology, time-travel, changing
the past—it’s all about the future:
today is tomorrow’s nostalgia
is today’s tomorrow.
The four-year old sat upright in the passenger seat
to guide his mother along the highway.
Late day’s light yellowed off the fields and the haystacks piled too high
on the truck in front of them.
The boy saw a strap fall off a haystack.
“Mommy, there’s something wrong.”
The mother didn’t seem alarmed.
He stared at the hay and began to think he’d imagined it.
A haybale fell.
“I told you, I told you!” said the boy.
A dozen more exploded onto the road.
The truck swerved, the mother swerved.
“It’s okay,” she pulled the car over.
The boy, in tears, “I told you.”
She held him, “It’s okay, everything is fine.”
The truck pulled over in front of them, half its cargo gone;
two men on the shoulder, hands on hips, looked back on the highway.
Cars were going by.
The boy breathed in and looked up.
His mother got back on the road.
Fifth grade ambition: the National
Geographic World blueprint
for a homemade solar cooker.
We scoured for foil and posterboard,
approximated the curve—I kept
having to redraw it—I cut and
covered it with foil, angled
our ringed contraption toward
the sun and placed the beneficiary
of our collective effort in the center:
a hot dog. Two hours in the sun
like two centuries. Didn’t cook.
“Red Sox lost,” Dad said when I got in the car
after working late at McDonald’s. I bitched
for 10 minutes. He passed our driveway and
kept driving. “Let me show you something
to be upset about.” At Germain’s butcher shop,
skid marks ran past the long lawn with cement pylons
through the intersection to a shiny silver-grey Camaro
pressed against a tree on Duff’s front lawn.
“Three kids are dead.” He’d heard it on the scanner.
Kids from Clinton I didn’t know. The next day
my friends came through drive-thru.
“Remember the girls we were with last week?”
I did. “That was them who got killed.”
Victims of a nameless drunk driver, said
the traffic report—the only person in the car
not killed—wasn’t that how it always was?
Later that night, the Sox were one strike away
from losing the series. Then David Henderson
hit his famous home run off Donnie Moore
in Game 5. The Sox won. Two weeks later,
one strike away from World Series victory,
the ball went through Buckner’s legs.
I knew the driver: Gus, kid from 6th grade
who lived in a royal blue house and brought
a grey leather soccer ball rough as my beard
on the bus every day, insisted we use it
at recess, gym, after school. We never did.
He left after a year, no one remembered him.
Three years later, Donnie Moore shot and
killed himself. His agent said the home run
had made him insane. In months came the trial.
The next door neighbor I’d been in love with
for years, home from college that night, testified
she saw Gus blur past racing another car
that ramped off the road, helicoptered over
a stone wall so far into a field we didn’t see it
that night. The drunk driver had challenged
Gus to the race. The guy lost his license,
months later was seen driving again,
drunk again. Gus had been sober, no more
reckless than me—everyone drove 100 mph
down my road. He went to jail for 20 years.
Three decades later the tree is no larger—
grey gnarled bark like the stones that make
our walls, covered in the same lichens; a ripple
petrified in its side. If you drive down the road
and keep driving, you’ll run into it.
Behind the tree, Duff’s house is now grey;
the house across the street as well—
every year another one in the neighborhood.
It’s been years since I’ve been back.
David Henderson died about my age,
from a heart attack. Older Sox fans
expressed sadness, relived the home run,
Donnie Moore; Buckner. Nostalgia
for a day. The Sox are winners now.
Gus is alive, free somewhere in Massachusetts.
“Will we be known as the Second Greatest Generation?”
Assures us he’ll “let others decide.”
Hold my five-dollar venti.
My mind’s a flaming Jesus-HC
orgy clamoring for words: Sociopathic
parentally-consensual tax-coded narcissism?
Bridges-falling scot-free financial Chernabylers?
Viagra-vaxxed, culture-warred insurrectolyptic fucktastrophe.
Someday they’ll insist they invented
the Orange Revolution, tried to save us all.
Years ago, the Boomer next door decided
to clean his septic tank with a stick
of dynamite. Made his kids put a rock
on top, lit a match: Boom!—
every car, roof and tree around
coated in toilet paper stink, so much
damned brown. He yelled at his sons,
“That rock wasn’t big enough!”
Hours later it rained, and he stayed outside.
“Next year we’ll need two sticks
and a much bigger rock.”
We watch a bee try to fly through the bottom
of a jar toward the sun, never pause to notice
the open end, change its mind.
Before I cross the bridge, the woman
in the audiostory crosses the bridge
and predicts five things. Four happen.
A red moment—scouring for a rock
to throw, reaching for the thing—
it’s gone. Was Amos still alive
when the Kingdom fell? Posterity
is a person left alone to endure
the atomic sun.
I’ve tried to connect this morning’s
silent words to those I love, want
to love, want; the responders, polite.
I don’t know how to turn over tables,
get kicked out of a damned city—can’t
get answers because I can’t receive
questions because if they asked me,
“How are you, how is life?”
I wouldn’t know.
It's Never Going Away, It's Never Going Back
Canada’s still burning. Tara tells me she can’t
go outside in New York. Taylor the Nahamsha
Hiker is hiking in New Hampshire, has to
go to an eye doctor. The smoke’s not
in Romania yet, but my eyes have hurt
pure red for three weeks. It’s calm
and nice here for once. On cue, hot
wind, then rain; we go from 33° to 23°
like that, the wind won’t stop.
I text Nayo, “WTF was that?”
She answers, “White man’s problems.”
I can handle anything with a nap:
inside my head, two crash test dummies
sit, feet up, in a Pinto with the engine idling.
“We’re waiting for the driver.” I get in
the back seat. A deer enters the test chamber
and grins, “Free deer meat? Here I am.
Do I stand here or jump in front
once you guys get rolling?” I didn’t
come here to watch a deer commit suicide.
“You’re in luck,” says Dummy #1.
“Driver can’t make it,” follows Dummy #2,
“so you can take the wheel and do it yourself.”
Never forget you’ve witnessed
Love Almighty in frightful
glory baptized powerless,
sent on its way.
Crying parents tell their children
If you survive, don't do as we did.
—The Fixx
I came to Didion, overlooking
that Hawaiian bay of 1967.
Keep thinking, write through
the thing—the narrative is
there is no narrative.
“But atomization—those kids
became the perpetrators!”
I waved out to sea.
“Ah,” she said, “they made it
all about them, didn’t they?”
Then she was gone.
August, 2022
I remember
remembering I was
awake I’m reaching
for something further
than I can my thought
is a word missing there
is a real distance I
can still grab at hold
straight ahead you
have to believe
me when I tell you
something is different
I feel I perceive
something I feel
I can’t describe
it’s out there I’m
almost there
Robert McTague is a poet and retired military officer who lives in Lusaka, Zambia. His poems appear in Bluepepper, EKL Review and NonBinary Review.
