Michael McFee

Saltine

How well its square
fit my palm, my mouth,
a toasty wafer slipped
onto the sick tongue
or into chicken soup,

each crisp saltine a tile
pierced with 13 holes
in balanced rows,
its edges perforated
like a postage stamp,

one of a shifting stack
sealed in wax paper
whose noisy opening
always signaled snack,
peanut butter or cheese

thick inside Premiums,
the closest we ever got
to serving hors d’oeuvres:
the redneck’s hardtack,
the cracker’s cracker.

—Published in THREPENNY REVIEW, Number 107, Volume 27, Number 3 (Fall 2006), p. 16.

Shoe Horn

Every Sunday morning
my socks would polish its short slide
as they sped toward heaven.

Slick silver tongue,
it sweet-talked my reluctant feet
into their first oxfords.

Like a flattened spoon,
it fed my cramped ever-growing soles
into years of knock-off shoes.

It was a sleek weapon
wielded while slipping on penny loafers--
cool curved blade, hook grip.

I forgot it in some closet,
forgot how to scoop my stepping-down self
so the leather stays uncrushed

until today, seeing dad
shoveling cracked heels into orthopedics,
struggling to fit into a hole.

Michael McFee’s most recent books are his seventh volume of poetry, Shinemaster (Carnegie Mellon University Press); his first collection of prose, The Napkin Manuscripts: Selected Essays and an Interview (University of Tennessee Press); and his brand-new chapbook of one-line poems, The Smallest Talk (Bull City Press). New poems have appeared recently or are due soon in Threepenny Review, Slate, Hudson and Gettysburg Reviews, and Cornbread Nation 3: Foods of the Mountain South. He teaches poetry-writing at UNC-Chapel Hill