Three Poems
Not the Wrong Time
Sleeper cell’s pineal leaks a limping present. The evening’s water-logged anticipation is its halo. This being how no one is taught to breathe. If reform begets proto-mercy, mirrors receive delicate packaging. Where there are stripes of ceiling poison and feet become the shape of age. A forehead’s indentations slip thumb-sucking under the engine. Nothing other than the cartoonish smoothness of an antenna’s caress grovels in its sleep.
They told my knifewife what to do at the bottom of a page.
But all she sees: silhouettes prior to my father afloat the drill bit ribcage of suspicion. I roll into a mounting contest with a needle tip. It’s a shared belief that we will stay where we stare. No preparation adjacent to squirming matter may be a pocket’s wrinkle. I don’t wish to interpret every inch of the bodiless bee.
Between
Having been born
between the delay
of hunger and memory
of hunger. The doppler
whorls in the bloodless
blue sky.
Oh, incidental synapse,
while merely shaking simulates firestorms,
these shadows match my shyness.
Pound
for pound, the house centipede
out-loves me.
And a faceless relative plants an egg
where there will be no confusion
once awake.
Not the Right Time
At a cliff’s motionless excuse for dominating her southern void, it feels good to whisper. We are the collateral of a God too divine for target practice.
Please don’t let my eyes, allow them. Such a stature of isolation penetrates cheap steel. Swiftly genetic under the weight of Kentucky roulette -- like how innocence with no coordinates is one’s choice of estrangement.
Donkey of emotions; sound itself without everyone else; I am here because.
Around the bending blackness zooms a confessional I follow amphibiously. “That’s a tough commercial.” Even that prospective memory is glad you like it. We’re gunna kinda go to bed for this week. Dragons strapping shadow goggles slurp clay, safely monitoring the situation. You’re as cunning but I wish you were as quiet. At my sleep I went looking for but fell awake. Vagal inertia rips off the sentient band-aid before I say grace. Hallowed be thy . .. . .. . ..
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Mason McClay is a writer and cognitive psychologist based in Los Angeles. He researches the structure of emotional memories and language in trauma and psychosis. His recent books are Dithers (Keith LLC, 2026) and Even a Worm Could Trip the Wire (Waste Management, 2026).