PROSE POETRY
ROBERT MCDONALD
CLINTON GROVE
What if the rabbits on these summer evenings, crouched on squares of lawn like nervous accountants, what if rabbits are vessels for the souls of the dead, would there be enough rabbits along all the greenways, enough bunnies under hedges at the outskirts of sight? So maybe those souls, the souls of our dead, are also held in cardinals, perched on wrought-iron fences an hour after dawn, and one hundred sparrows, arguing among scales of goldfish crackers under the sun-faded plastic bench on the playground. Maybe Whitman had everything right, and starlight and streetlights are very much the same, and oaks seek to hold us with their twelve thousand hands, and the voice I think I hear just before sleep is my mother’s voice, singing one of the best songs that she knows. It’s the way she’s found to call to me from where she resides, woven in the carpet of Clinton Grove’s goose-cropped cemetery grass.
Robert McDonald’s first book of poems, "A Streetlight That's Been Told It Used to Be the Moon," is coming from Roadside Press in 2026. His work has appeared in Painted Bride Quarterly, The Marrow, Gyroscope Review, and The Madrid Review, among others. He lives with his husband in Chicago.
