Pete Mackey

Poetry

Pete Mackey’s poetry has been published in numerous venues, most recently in West Trade Review, Moving Force Journal, Farmer-ish, Bangalore Review, Cathexis Northwest Press, and Third Wednesday, including a Pushcart Prize nominee. He lives with his wife and children in Amherst, MA, where he founded and runs a communications company that serves colleges across the U.S. and where he loves that bobcats, bears, and many other types of wildlife wander through the yard.

 

Wood

What I have here, and maybe you too, could have been mitered, drilled, and shaved; trim, beam, and jamb, it is what you make of it. Timber laid low, become frame, joist, floor. The house within the home. Lit, blazing, and burned; fire, light, and ash, giving its everything. Blossoming with buds and fruit, finally returning a show. The difference time makes. It surrounds us, growing, until felled and fashioned for use. Not one thing but many. Softwood pulped at the end to begin again as the blank thing ahead.

“ I was staring at the blank computer screen and started probing the ways the actuality of a piece of paper comes to be. Sitting in a house and thinking about what’s behind it, literally, the more I wanted to condense the sense of origins and one thing being many possibilities. It was only after the middle section wrote itself that the opening and closing lines created a circularity. ”

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