Poem of the Week | November 09, 2015

This week we offer a new poem by Gary L. McDowell. McDowell is the author of five collections of poetry, including Mysteries in a World that Thinks There Are None (Burnside Review Press, 2016), winner of the 2014 Burnside Review Press Book Award; Weeping at a Stranger’s Funeral (Dream Horse Press, 2014); and American Amen (Dream Horse Press, 2010), winner of the 2009 Orphic Prize in Poetry. He’s also the co-editor of The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry (Rose Metal Press, 2010). His poems and essays have appeared in journals such as American Poetry Review, The Nation, Gulf Coast, New England Review, Prairie Schooner, and Colorado Review. He lives in Nashville, TN with his family where he’s an assistant professor of English at Belmont University.
 
Author’s note:

Alice Fulton wrote, “Narrative is about what happens next; poetry is about what happens now.” In writing “Massive and Tiny as a Star,” I was trying to create the immediacy Fulton requires of poetry without losing the ‘what happens next.’ My daughter was stung by a bee last summer—she was three years old—while sitting on my lap. I felt—still feel, really—guilty, felt like I’d let her down somehow, but of course it was merely a coincidence, a happenstance, a ‘narrative’ outside of my control. But the poem started with me thinking about bees, about their wingedness. Then bats. Then birds. “I [felt] like singing.” The image of a dead bird nailed to my neighbor’s front door is a fabrication, but the nest, that really happened, and it made me feel the same kind of vulnerability I felt when that bee stung my daughter: a helpless kind, a spinning-ones-wheels kind. So a bit of this, a bit of that, and the poem happened “next.”