Vox Populi
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Leslie Anne Mcilroy: Two Poems
Danger Red Daily
The cows form a constellation in the pasture,
Orion, Ursa Major, Taurus. They are chewing.
Everyone is driving 40 mph minimum around
the tightening curves lined with Trump signs.
Driving through Pennsylvania is lovely
except for the God, Bait & Guns of it all,
except for the money and bullets behind it,
the fishing line, triggers and damnation.
Geese and ducks die from line injuries on
the regular, lose their legs, lose their lives,
all because fishermen don’t clean up after
themselves. And don’t get me started on hooks.
It’s danger red daily at the pond for waterfowl
and small children, the farmer’s dog and the off
squirrel. But who can be bothered picking up
with a trout on the line and a photo opp waiting?
The barns, the fields, the stacked firewood all
look so bucolic. Only I see the sheep dead on
the side of the road, hawks hungering overhead.
And even the cows — those stellar animals —
know they are just beef in the end.
~~
Cold Knife Cone
Even the kindest doctor has a dark side.
Dancing with death demands a touch
of gallows humor shared amongst the coats.
He calls it a CKC, says it will determine
stage, whether I need a regular or “radical”
hysterectomy. Radical, really?
Can’t I just have a profound or progressive
operation? Need it be so alarming? Indeed.
It’s a gamble, the deal already dealt.
He reports his findings to the typing nurse.
“Good vaginal length,” he says and I laugh.
GVL, like I have been given an ace.
Cancer is such a funny thing, The way
one cell can change everything,
like getting the Joker in a deck of cards.
Everyone’s laughing now, so hard
they are crying, so hard, they don’t
notice that the game is over.
— for Dr. John Nakayama
~~~~
Copyright 2025 Leslie Anne Mcilroy
Leslie Anne Mcilroy’s poetry collections include Liquid Like This (2008) and Slag (2014). Her memoir, The Red Door: An Historical Memoir of The Squirrel Hill Cafe was published by Main Street Rag in 2020. Leslie writes for Libsyn in Pittsburgh, PA, where she lives with her personal medic, Riz, and her dog, Butter.
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Love gallows humor. It’s how I get through everyday.
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Me too!
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“Driving through Pennsylvania is lovely
except for the God, Bait & Guns of it all,
except for the money and bullets behind it,
the fishing line, triggers and damnation.”
So much “except for” in this country now–
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Watching my partner, Pam, carry on for almost 11 years with ovarian cancer, the medical jokes were few between me as the spouse, and her teams of health care workers. They seemed to look on her as a battlefield or a chess board, though one can wonder what they joked about to each other as they continually sliced and diced with death.
Both poems have a keystone concern with interactions between deadly matters, and our quest for conquest of the diseases that cause them… in Danger Red Daily, an existential disease, in Cold Knife Cone, a medical one.
But, both poems also help me ponder how there can be the sense of an aesthetic beauty in spite of the fishhooks or out of control body parts. Some of my favorite walks of past years were in Pittsburgh, punctuated by the sounds coming from a nearby rifle range. A swirl of peace or a smile among discord, like both these poems evoke. Hope and fear mixing along the Allegheny.
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Oh my, Jim. What a beautiful prose poem you’ve offered us here.
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Lovely poems. We lived in Northwestern Pennsylvania for a time. Coal City, a populated place on the Allegheny just north of I-80. Lovely indeed aside from good ‘ol boys sneering at my brother and I across the cold classrooms of Cranberry High.
And “Cold Knife Cone.” Oh my. A funny thing indeed. Thank you especially for this one. Jokers, however, are sometimes wild.
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Aye, sometimes wild.
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