Everything Must Go

February 19, 2025 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

She woke before dawn to secure the sign into her yard. “EVERYTHING MUST GO!” it said in large, block letters she had traced from a stencil. “EVERYTHING” was waiting under blanketed tables in the garage, which she trundled out into the driveway as the neighbors’ lights clicked on for the day. She sipped from a thermos of coffee, breathing heavily with the strain of lifting and the uneasiness of letting go.

When folks arrived she greeted them with a smile, saying, “PRICES NEGOTIABLE!” with the same enthusiasm as the sign, as if stenciled. She watched the knickknacks dwindle down throughout the day, tallying each purchase in a ledger. In her heart was another ledger, taking toll in a different way.

Ode to Flying Squirrel

February 6, 2025February 4, 2025 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

I used to believe in
spring creatures that flew

The butterflies and larks
that carried me to you.

But in the autumn of life
I lost that desire

Of wing against wing,
melodies upon highwire.

Because you had left me,
now just marrow and cinder

On streetlamp I wept,
eyes swollen, and tender.

Though now, in winter,
souls are huddled, collective

I dream once again, of
your memories, perspectives.

“Spread wide your form,
leap forth if you dare”

Your words just the same,
reassuring and fair.

Why was I filled with
such immeasurable sorrow?

Wasting what time remained,
a life unfit to borrow?

So I jump from on high,
putting trust in your words

And, summer-kissed once again,
soar alongside the birds.

Dead Worm on the Basement Floor

January 3, 2025December 11, 2024 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

Silurian conduit
Braiding the soil
Sightless, unseen

It would not know “light”
But wonders—

What of this strange fracture
This slight warmth
What is beyond it?

An “un-earthing” occurs
Or “ex-earthing” or “in-airing”

The nomenclature of inversion

In that moment, the worm learns that
“Lost” is a loneliness

It must learn these
Truths quicker than us
Its timeline torn, uncertain

It realizes:

“Lost” is cold stone
Primer gray
Writhing tides of endless ocean
Crests of laundry lint,
Gurgling drain

“Lost” is growing tired
Of coiling
Meaning from
Negation

“Lost” is slowness.
Stationariness.

Is dryness,
Is being
Buried in air

Planting Season

March 23, 2024 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

Seed

I would spend hours out among the collection of Arkansas pines that hugged the eastern edge of the property, breathing in their ethereal presence that seemed imbued with a bygone, forbidden magic. Instead of unloading the semi, assembling the dining table and chairs, doing anything to further the idea that you and I were now permanent, stationary creatures trying out that thing called domesticity, out there among the pines I remained, trying to decipher the undiscovered language hidden in the bark patterns, hoping to find the answers, a reason for our new life in the heart of the heart of the country. And though the house would eventually open itself to us, I would—selfishly, I realize now, no matter how much you told me otherwise—pass the time out there while you searched for temp gigs to tide us over until the farm was up and running, contemplating the chaos of the passing weeks, ignoring those to come.

Independence Day

February 23, 2023 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

After the fight, the mother took the children across the state line to buy fireworks, and the father went to the garage to work on the car he’d been restoring. As soon as the mother left the house, her remaining tears evaporated instantly from the heat. Inside the garage, the father’s sweat formed a clinging bond between the back of his shirt and his skin. He bent over the hood, peering into the mess of gaskets. He adjusted a bolt or two, disinterested at the work. The light was dusty-orange, filtered through a four-paned window on the eastern wall, one of its panes missing, covered by a slice of cardboard. The fight had rattled him, ignited something he couldn’t understand.

The children were both as fiery as bottle rockets, their minds racing at the thought of purchasing illegal fireworks: an espionage mission. They had simultaneously forgotten about the fight they had overheard through the open window as they played upon first mention of spycraft.

Behind the wheel, the mother dug into her nail beds, extracting a piece of misplaced dirt. She, unlike the father, no longer felt rattled. The heat got to our heads, she said to herself as the milemarkers dropped in number. But, as her van crossed the state line, as she saw the signs and the banners, she wondered if there was more to it than the heat. She shrugged the thought away, focusing instead on the squealing children in the backseat.

They purchased six bags of fireworks for the town’s annual Independence Day celebration. Bright and colorful fountains of fire; cherry bombs; moon whistlers that lasted for minutes; mortar shells that erupted in bright splashes of color, all tucked away in brown paper sacks in the back of the van.

Adona Sleeps on Mount Ararat

December 2, 2022 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

And Marla is sitting behind the wheel of the old four-by, driving past her now. It is dusk on the eastern outskirts, and way out past the three curves where my brother lives are the first stars. Adona is buried somewhere in the golden light of end day, in the dregs of sunlight that are still seeping into the basin of the river valley through the clouds. The family lot at Mount Ararat Cemetery is burning its low, hot embers.

Tuck and Marla are up front, and I am crammed up in the back, my long legs hedged between my niece’s booster chair and a Styrofoam cooler half full of beer and half full of deer sausage. A comfortable, boozy silence fills the air of the truck. Until Marla breaks it.

“Some day it’ll by us on Ararat,” she says, twiddling her calloused thumbs against the wheel like her eminent demise is no big deal. “We were talking a month ago, before you got back, about our stone.” Tuck and Marla, ragtag parents extraordinaire, ready to die at fifty. The curveballs never stop.

She goes on. “A joint marker we were thinking. Maybe two little hearts that intertwine in marble, kissed with doves. What do you think?”

To YOUNG ONE, Dead on My Roof

April 19, 2022April 20, 2022 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

i.
the icelandic word
gluggaveður
loosely translates to
“window weather”
and how fitting
for that day
in early april

ii.
when a sinister shape
took my window, all
rook and malice,
primordial sound-terror
echolalia caw, caw, aw
and perched on the
plateau of my garage —

iii.
•scanning, scanning•
buttonblack were his eyes,
obsidian
and carrioncrazed!
the raven slid his talons
pianist-like across the shingles

Warm Hands

February 5, 2020February 5, 2020 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

I wrote this piece as a part of Write Now, a 48-hour flash fiction writing contest for University of Iowa Alumni, and was selected as a finalist. I hope you enjoy it.

My grandmother’s hands are veined tributaries of deep, blue memory, as warm as her famous Sunday dinner rolls, as even and steady as a taut clothesline. Whenever I visit, I make sure to hold them at least once, while we’re sharing a pot of tea, or during our afternoon walk, or when we’re cleaning the dishes.

That connection makes me feel safe; it always has, since I was a small girl, when she would run her hands across my back until I fell asleep. Now a woman myself, I nurture a longing for that connection again, to sleep away the world’s problems on her couch, wake to the small sounds of chores, the clink of plates stacking in the cabinet, the spray of an aerosol cleaner against a dusty surface.

Becoming Them

October 1, 2018October 2, 2018 trentmcmahon2 Comments

New Skin

There were a great many things that triggered Tamal throughout the apartment that had once been theirs and was now just his. The dishes in the sink, unfinished bars of soap, the blender that had been left behind in the cupboard where small appliances were sent to die, the collection of condoms that had fallen between the bedpost and the wall. The list went on and on in his head, ad nauseam.

Tamal was a prisoner bound by the belongings his ex had left behind, and instead of clearing them out, throwing open the windows, trying a new scent of candle, disinfecting everything with a bleach bath to remove the residual stains of memory, he let the dishes collect, the soap harden, the blender dust over. There were so many triggers that he could no longer discern the world of triggers from the world of normal. It all spun around and around in his mind, covering everything in blight.

Each day, he allowed himself only one chance to escape the apartment for a few hours. Even prisoners were allowed their daily walks in the yard. He would leave the apartment behind and walk a few blocks to the park, sit at one the benches, and watch people pass by, the air buzzing with the sound of children playing at the equipment in desperate need of replacement.

Levent (Part Two)

July 23, 2018 trentmcmahonLeave a comment

The Keys

His boss had scrubbed away most of his assignments when he returned to work the following week, but Charlie was glad to be back to it, in the way that his mind became occupied by the letters and words and sentences of his editing. It was enough to sustain his appetite, but not enough to overwhelm it, like pasta salad in July to his post-funeral palate. There came a preternatural effortlessness to his editing now that he had one less reason to go home; it was like his brain was ready to welcome any tool necessary to forget. He excelled through his first two assignments, inquired his boss for additional work, until he was the most productive in the office, bar none.

But the workday could only last so long, and their home was just that — theirs. There was no separating where Levent’s belongings began and Charlie’s ended. And it didn’t help there were so many things to begin with. Their friends knew them as the packrats of the group, each inherently unable to let go of the bric-a-brac that accumulated seemingly overnight, the kind of people you would ask if you wanted to spend a day trying to make pasta, because, and it was almost a guarantee, Levent and Charlie would have a once-used pasta maker lying around somewhere.