McDonald’s

By Anders Carlson-Wee

Issue 34 • Fall 2016 • Poetry

FIRST PLACE POETRY IN THE 2016 SUMMER CONTEST

The images in this poem are fraught with a pristine specificity, describing a life as it ghosts itself before us. I found myself standing beside the “you,” right there in the bathroom, asking “what next?” a question good poems demand of us. – Ocean Vuong

You walk all night and into the next day
to survive the sudden October snow.

You have no money or hope of money.
Your backpack is a cloth sack with duct-

tape straps and safety pins in place
of zippers. Your gloves have no thumbs,

just holes, just unraveling half fingers.
You’ve come inside for the heat,

for plastic spoons, mayo, salt and sugar
packets, hand-napkins you’ll ball later

for insulation beneath your clothes.
You’ve come for the bathroom––soap

to scrub your face, your neck, your pits,
toilet rolls for kindling flames as you camp

alone tonight in the woods or in a silo.
Mirror for popping your zits, hand-dryer

for drying your hair, your musty coat.
You’ve come to run warm water

over hands you can no longer feel,
come to sit and rest and do nothing,

and think nothing, and be no one.
You ask the boy at the counter

if you can have some water. He nods,
tapping his foot to a bluegrass tune,

slides a paper cup toward you
with a smooth memorized hand, asks

out of habit if that will be everything.

Anders Carlson-Wee

Anders Carlson-Wee is a 2015 NEA Fellow and the author of Dynamite, winner of the 2015 Frost Place Chapbook Prize. His work has appeared in Ploughshares, New England Review, AGNI, Poetry Daily, The Iowa Review, Best New Poets, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and Narrative Magazine, which featured him on their “30 Below 30” list of young writers to watch. Winner of Ninth Letter’s Poetry Award and New Delta Review’s Editors’ Choice Prize, he was runner-up for the 2016 Discovery/Boston Review Poetry Prize. He’s received fellowships from Bread Loaf, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Camargo Foundation, Ucross Foundation, The Frost Place, and Vanderbilt University. He lives in Minneapolis, where he’s a 2016 McKnight Foundation Creative Writing Fellow.