Matt McBride
Summer 2025 | Poetry
Three Poems
The Age of Broken Bottles on the Sidewalk
Every day, I left
a mannequin of myself behind.
I glued pennies to my skin
like a disease.
Teeth mushroomed on tree trunks.
Empty body bags lay everywhere.
Seven children played by
keeping an inflated surgical glove aloft.
Two years later,
the war of no touching would break out.
The Age of Everyone’s It
The clouds coted like doves
as bruises made doilies under our skin.
We’d scatter like pink roaches,
then stand still
like crucifixes without a cross.
The grass was waves of fingers.
Every sign depicted a hand
making a gun shape.
The Age of Small Ghosts Between
Our thoughts covered everything in dandruff.
Trees sagged with taxidermied birds.
The sea so full of messages in bottles
it sounded like a xylophone;
and night, a clower of pupils,
made a vast darkness without us.
We stayed apologetically ourselves.
Matt McBride's work has recently appeared in or is forthcoming from Collidescope, Conduit, The Cortland Review, Figure 1, Guernica, Impossible Task, The Laurel Review, The Missouri Review, The Rupture, Rust+Moth, and Zone 3 among others. He is the author of two full-length poetry collections, City of Incandescent Light (Black Lawrence, 2018) and At the Mercy of the Flies (Half Mystic, 2026) as well as four chapbooks. His most recent, Prerecorded Weather, co-written with Noah Falck, won the 2022 James Tate Prize and is available at SurVision Books. He can be found online at www.mattmcbridepoetry.com.