“Dissociation” and “Central Park, Nocturne,” Two Poems by David McLoghlin
From the Collection “Crash Center”
“Dissociation”
During sex the mind drifts free
a gull—a gulf—
off the body’s edge
back to the realm
of hurt, where the self
is an intense buzzing of bees
—insects, pins and needles:
helpers—maybe mice
frantically trying
to wake the young hero
from the sleep he was in,
has been in all these years
where something is happening where
someone is doing something to him.
*
“Central Park, Nocturne”
“The living iguanas will come to bite the men who do not dream.”
–Federico García Lorca.
Black trees—a little snow. People pause, deferring
to expensive dogs, maybe find a moment, like prayer,
breviary. From the reservoir, the buildings park-side seem
Angkor-Wat accretion, mud cities in Mali.
Gateway of oasis. City of the wolf and the iguana.
My childhood and future seem to have departed
to go jaunting, along empty pathways
under lamplight—electricity mimicking gas light—
in a park from home: the Retiro, maybe Phoenix Park.
Leaf preserved in grey ice. White ambergris.
Yellow hexagonals corona, come on high up,
hive-like, extending, silent. Night’s calm black,
under surfacing.
______________________________
Crash Center by David McLoghlin is available via Salmon Poetry.
David McLoghlin
David McLoghlin is a prize-winning poet, and a writer of memoir and personal essay. He is published by Salmon Poetry, one of Ireland’s most international and innovative poetry presses. His third book, Crash Centre, was published in May 2024 and launched at Cork International Poetry Festival. Apart from a major bursary (grant) for memoir from Ireland’s Arts Council, and a personal essay published in the anthology Others Will Enter the Gates: Immigrant Poets on Poetry, Influences, and Writing in America (Black Lawrence Press), his poems have been broadcast on WNYC’s Radioloab and anthologized on both sides of the Atlantic, most notably in Grabbed: Poets and Writers on Sexual Assault, Empowerment and Healing (Beacon Press, 2020). An essay on studying under poet Sharon Olds at New York University’s Creative Writing Program is forthcoming in This Glistening Verb (University of Michigan Press) as part of their "Under Discussion" series. He is currently writing about his grandfather, the golf architect, Eddie Hackett, widely considered "the Father of Irish Golf Design." An essay is forthcoming in Golfer’s Journal, about playing Connemara Golf Links as a complete novice, one of Hackett’s best designs. McLoghlin teaches memoir for The Center for Fiction, Hudson Valley Writers Center and The Irish Writers Centre and lives in Cork, Ireland.
