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  • Incunabula Descending the Stairs
  • Max McDonough (bio)

Somewhere between the first move andthe last, my mother orders a chandelier online

but doesn’t know how to install it.It’s sometime late November: early dark,

the day going out, barbeque in the ovenstarting to fill the house with an odor my brothers

wrestling in the basement will soon smell,bringing them pounding up the stairs.

On a ladder in the foyer, she’s replacing just the crystalsfrom the old wrought-iron chandelier,

stringing each new tear-shaped geminto the curve of a black hook,

so its empty weight dangles there for duskto scatter through it, slanting from the windows

into flecks of bleached rainbow sentslowing across the walls like a song fading

into the memory of a song.Perched on a high rung, she looks a moment

at me descending the stairs, my gangling bodywrapped in a blanket, hair like a mop,

and for a brief time, our gazes crossat the same height, eye level and speechless, looking

into someone else’s life that is also our own life.I don’t know what keeps her mind stiff [End Page 111]

but spinning like a weather vane in a storm.It’s unclear if she feels—quiet as she is, watching those jewels

suspend—the strange intrigueof seeing through them her own body as it might look

afterwards: a shadow, distorted,spilling its shape across the floor. [End Page 112]

Max McDonough

max mcdonough’s poetry and essays have been featured in the New York Times, T Magazine, Best New Poets, Food52, AGNI, and elsewhere. *

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