#Karyna McGlynn

[spiderrvein]

When You’re Seventeen Everything Sounds like a Secret Anthem to Doom - Karyna McGlynn

[rustbeltjessie]

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl

It’s no wonder          I’m always tired          with all these tract houses—                                    It’s night & cold on my belly in                                                  the undeveloped field now                                    I have to bury her clothing inside                                                a black garbage bag in plot D police cars roll         past but continue        down the treeless parkway                                    even after shining       their lights on                                                  me in my freshman sundress                                    I can only assume they don’t see                                                  the significance of my presence but I must say          1994 is a simpler         time—not everyone is suspect                                    I crawl up next to my old house                                                   & look through a lit window                                    my mother reads a book in bed            I want to knock           on the glass, there’s something                                    I need to tell her

—Karyna McGlynn

[razorsadness]

When You’re Seventeen Everything Sounds like a Secret Anthem to Doom

Death is everywhere. There are flies on the windscreen. —Depeche Mode

And the sea’s grief swings its heavy fringe forth each time you bend over in silver sequins, or a boy howls out the moonroof of a borrowed Nissan Maxima. Blood surges. Blast the synth. Take the dark, twisty roads fast. Flick off the headlights deep in the sticks. Take long swigs of cinnamon liquor, soar past the graveyard— hands off the wheel, feet off the floorboard.

Don’t make too much meaning of the fact Depeche Mode is playing each time you should but do not die.

Listen: There’s a kind of drunk boy who will jerk the wheel on a slick road on purpose, because you can’t sing the Right Words.

The night it ices over, for instance— trees spangled in crystalline Love Code:

          late page      lit match     Let’s have

         a line of blow                    a black celebration—

Even as you crash through the guardrail he will swear he is joking.

                                       A slice of you will always be caught in the dead

                             air of this joke.

                   Will always be forked in this creek: headlights cracking

the ice crust, glowing the river stones. Always the same

                   rap on the glass with a fat Maglite, and the way

                             he wheedles the police, wide-eyed.

Of course he becomes a coke dealer who joins the Navy. You even live long enough to buy him a model Porsche from Sharper Image. You ghost him in college.

What did you expect? The part where Death oozes up his spiral staircase to claim you as Bride? Who were you anyway? I mean to crash into an icy river & walk away.

Do it. Slip the memory all the way up your arm like an opera glove & through the glass of a plummeting Maxima. Reach out & touch the cold down of Doom’s Cheek. Hear his huge horse snort. Attend to the warm wound of Dave Gahan’s voice. Make sense of a single black feather smothered in snow.

—Karyna McGlynn, from POETRY Magazine (October 2022)

[tiaochan]

from  When You’re Seventeen Everything Sounds like a Secret Anthem to Doom by Karyna McGlynn

[poem-today]

A poem by Karyna McGlynn

Halloween in the Anthropocene

& Memphis is out in Full Fang! Skeletons skip down our pitted streets. Whole families with matching hobo stipple roam tragicomically through the sprawling candy deserts: polka-dot bandanas on sticks, flapping Chaplinesque shoes.

Unclaimed pumpkins pile high behind razor wire. The air's thick with caw & trouble. Our porch light's out but we stay in, listening to the festive cackle of semiautomatics in the autumn night.

Some faceless Handmaids do a spooky hopscotch in a Walgreens parking lot. Two drunk men in tiger masks loll from the window of a passing truck to tell some Handmaid she's "thicc as shit." Anyway,

Witches are back! They straddle plastic brooms—streaming across the moon's bright knuckle: hedge witches & wicked witches. Waves of Sabrinas: blonde bobs, black headbands, whole hexes of freckles! Here come the Elphabas & Endoras, the Elviras & Elsas. Even a couple of Baba Yagas—bewitched huts strutting forth on sexy chicken legs!

So what if it's a bit more wink than Wand.

We've stopped scaring ourselves on purpose, stopped wearing our Weirds on our Outsides. My sweetie's spilled on the couch as Melted Clock. I park myself on the dark stoop as Empty Pyrex Bowl.

According to the Post-it Note on my face, my nickname is No-Treats-for-the-Wicked. I'm a weird white lady on an unlit porch. No one dare approach this childless abode— not for phantom candy. Certainly not for clarification.

Karyna McGlynn

More poems by Karyna McGlynn are available through her website.

[vintagereject]

Karyna McGlynn

[urfaust]

Jesus under a cellar of black ice, fixed underground, under god, by musca, this fly hummed hymn in reverse. An egg sac moves, Mary in and out of my reach, underwatch the driftweeds where it slivers off. I cannot stop it. This downward dog, this pole position.

Karyna McGlynn, "...& the Southern Cross Slid Below the Belt"

[napuleh]

I Show Up Twelve Years Late For Curfew, Karyna McGlynn

I appear cold, muddy, unstable in the foyer. My parents are polite, but stiff, like a French host family.

They have new children, who have new toys which make intergalactic noises in the night.

Their eyes are brown with gold flecks, not like mine.

They either can't remember things or don't care that I hate tomatoes. Over dinner, my mother asks my middle name. When I tell her, she says "oh, yes?"

Trying to feel relevant now is a bit like touching my own mouth shot full of anesthetic, or forming the word "bouche" while drunk.

I survey the unnatural ocean of their new blue carpet and try not to chew like a starving person.

This is my family, these people so inept at things like memory and monopoly, I feel like a trickster god hiding my funny-money under the board.

[lizardgoats]

Get thee to the forest! Make a ball gown out of moss, It's what you've always wanted. With your body out of the way the loam & animal musk might breathe you back into being.

“You Must Wake Up” in 50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse, by Karyna McGlynn  

[higherentity]

[bostonpoetryslam]

All winter I wait for him to want me. Look, he says, an animal makes a hole in the snow and waits. So I wait. Violets pulse like shrapnel through the crust, drifts break down overnight. The salt remains.

Karyna McGlynn, “Milk Bath,” from Hothouse

[rhymaes]

“The Girls I Grew Up with Were Hard,” Karyna McGlynn

[rustbeltjessie]

Karyna McGlynn, from “We Sing Mozart’s Requiem in the Back of the Cruiser” (50 Things Kate Bush Taught Me About the Multiverse, Sarabande Books, 2022)

As far as we understand, any Singer who would express her remorse so Beautifully, & so Publicly, must be Immediately Unbound.

“Straighten up, ladies,” they are supposed to say, cordially adjusting their heavy belts.

Instead, they take us Downtown. They lower the radio chatter to listen as we thunder: Dies Irae! Dies Illa! (Day of Wrath! Doom Impending!) One officer softens, sorry for us. The other looks nervous: “Hush, now.”

We imagine Our Mothers: newly distraught & accosting our closets. Side-by-Side Close-Up as they discover our plunder!

Heaps of it. Plaid skirts & Mudd jeans. Vanilla candles, crystal clutches, full-on fairy wings, marabou fans, thigh-high stockings balled into doll-sized silver backpacks w/ bottles of Mini Thins, gluey tubes of Great Lash, ironic kazoos, Schlitterbahn shot glasses, or (shit!) that black satin corset w/ shiny

hellfire flickering up its cinch!

And oh my god the stolen hoop skirts. The light-up wands that play Magic Arpeggios when waved at strangers. Those red stilettos w/ little padlocks at the ankles!

Lord Have Mercy for Our Helpless Mothers now quivering in the face of this Failure. They sink to their knees in the Twin Spotlights of our separate Klepto Heavens. Kyrie eleison.

Sweet Lord Jesus hear our plaint— We sing of Day-Glo G-strings & Lo! The lipsticks, lipsticks, lipsticks.

[witchpunk]

I think grief delights in catching me at all the wrong angles.

Karyna McGlynn, "God, I Got Down There to Get Off"

[tiaochan]

from  When You’re Seventeen Everything Sounds like a Secret Anthem to Doom  by Karyna McGlynn

[tlhopkinson]

NO FEE Submission call + editor interview - Whiskey Island, DEADLINE: Nov. 15, 2017

NO FEE Submission call + editor interview – Whiskey Island, DEADLINE: Nov. 15, 2017

Whiskey Island Magazine is a well-established print literary magazine that’s been around in for over 30 years.

They have a respectable roster of contributing writers, including some of my favorites: Mary Ruefle, Maggie Smith, Steve Almond, Chiara Barzini, Denise Duhamel, Roxane Gay, Anne Germanacos, Matt Hart, Bob Hicok, Dora Malech, Karyna McGlynn, John McNally, Alissa Nutting, Aurelie Sheehan,…