In McDonalds
After Burial
0638 military time. 2500 without sleep. The homeless man across dine-in looked enough like Christ to order two McGriddle meals. For me, a witness. Assignments are far, henna blossoms are farther. For Him, random kindness. Says I never really got scripture. The thought of Solomon or a Word doc. sounds of static. I swallow my lips. Silent, habitual grace. No one speaks with molasses in their teeth; folded eggs blanket our tongues like communion bread. It's cold, the booth. They’re fuzzy, His incisors. Says Syrup reminds me of homemade breakfast, tears His hash brown with hands. Our window plays a one-shot of America while I ponder Where is the American Dream? I cup my temples—we watch a parking lot sunrise.
Gavin Garza
Gavin Garza was raised in the Institute of Basic Life Principles, a Christian cult. Today, he is a Chicano poet and student studying at the University of California, Berkeley. Nominated for Best of the Net, his work has been featured or is forthcoming in One Art, The Acentos Review, MudRoom, Eucalyptus Lit, and more. Garza is a staff editor for the Berkeley Poetry Review and stays rooted to Fresno, California. Find him on Instagram @gavinopoet.
Why this Knocked Taylor Out:
There's kind of this surface level (and when I say surface level I mean in relation to the craft of the poem, not that the interaction itself was surface level) interaction happening, and underneath it is this massive current of tension of being raised religious and being taught to love your neighbor, but then seeing that fail so often in practice. I think the mix of short sentences with longer descriptive ones within the prose is also working really well.
I also think the prose form works well here because we can sit within the block of text and within the interaction without being distracted. This says a lot about how we could approach more interactions in our daily life. How are we building community with those who need it most right now? What are we being distracted by that we could set down in order to take more care of those around us? What is worth our attention? I think this poem is asking us to consider where we place our attention and why.
Interview:
Why did you choose Team Taylor for this poem?
Because Team Martheaus had two excellent McDonalds pieces last year, and I just had to pull up.
***note from Taylor: looking for my second McDonalds poem to even the score people…***
Okay, but seriously. I figured what the poem was doing—situating questions of faith in something as homogeneous and Americana as a McDonalds—was right up Team Taylor's alley.
What type of poetics do you see your writing typically situated within? How is this poem situated within that, or a deviation from that?
I’m very Fresno, which is to say my voice is rooted more in place than practice. Read any Fresno poet—Sara Borjas, Anthony Cody, Joseph Rios—or talk to any Fresnan and you’ll find frankness and immediacy, always a tinge of rage if not overt. I'm not doing it any favors, but if you're unfamiliar with California’s Central Valley, I find Fresno poetics share commonalities with georgics, hip-hop, and the Midwest—the anchors, the narratives, the refusal to code-switch, how the breath is measured in each line. It's all there. Juan Felipe Herrera says we're the poetry capital of the world for a reason.
Yet I think for many Fresnans the dream is to get out. This was one of the first poems I wrote when I transferred to UC Berkeley, and I remember feeling completely out of my depth—I got what I wanted. It’s a simultaneous truth of wanting something safe and wanting something just beyond oneself; craving something soft for your future while searching for your god or guardian angel to remind you of your past. So, the deviation here was polish. I had a lot of rough edges when I left Fresno, and overnight Berkeley started pulling me in a million different places. I was going through a transplant.
How did you choose which details needed to be in this poem in order to create the world of the poem?
I think it’s less that I know what choices I need to make and more so that each detail is an extension of my inner life. Writing has always felt subconscious for me. Lately, I’ve been reading Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, and in it he argues that the poetic image is a product of heart, body, and soul, unconcerned with psychological investigation. Each image in my work is something I’ve found myself confiding in when I’m out and about—it's poetry as documentary. But narrative isn’t enough either: I need each poem to have its own phenomenology, something worn in and livable to hand-me-down to the reader. Above all, though, that means I have to be sincere.
I have to be sincere.