MATT MCBRIDE

The Party

On inflatable furniture

we waded a cultural pause.

The wind had hair in it.

The carnival

was erected in a day.

Drunk ballerinas

played Twister® on stage.

When surveyed, we replied

we are good.

The Party

People tied mannequins

to car roofs like deer.

I had this good job

sewing eggs together.

The Party

We used Instagram

to make sure our dreams

were consistent. It was

one big beast fable

with no moral, though

morale was high. We divined

ramen noodles’ cursive.

We couldn’t remember

which yesterday

we missed so much.

Nightly, we’d storm landfills

and dig up our lost toys.

Matt McBride is the author of City of Incandescent Light (Black Lawrence, 2018). He has published four chapbooks, the most recent, Prerecorded Weather, written with Noah Falck, won the 2022 James Tate Prize and is forthcoming from SurVision books. Recently, his poetry has appeared in The Cortland Review, Impossible Task, Guernica, The Rupture, Rust+Moth, and Zone 3 among others. You can find him on Twitter (@matthewdmcbride) and Instagram (at_the_mercy_of_the_flies).