Paul McDonald

Here a barn is glorious. Young Paul McDonald’s budding attention peaks
to see the shingled kingdom, the hiding place. Darling, entreats Paul’s nanny
–alien to countryside–olly olly oxen free. Paul, found and fully grown, would study the loft
of eaves, the cantilevered beams, the trajectory of ceiling to an eternal blue beyond.

In school, Paul idly materializes silos of grains, surviving designs from the time
of regional identity, there a barn made principally of wood. He cannot justify why
he fine-tunes the scale cardboard prototypes, sands their sides, picks up the pieces. 
Working through the night, Paul names allies in men who pioneered their living.

Paul is called nearsighted, the peer feedback dizzying. In his sketch of a farm, here a barn
looks mislaid against the green valley. They critique how it is only a barn, is it conveniently
located? A premium getaway in the company of donkeys and sheep. Ingredients for a dream 
wedding. Purity you can count on. American breakfast with all the meat.

His good eye sends Paul’s work overseas, eight thousand miles multiplying the anxiety
he left behind. There a wife tightens a bridal sari the color of clementines. Asked to describe
his daughter crying for the first time, it was not unlike a wildfire whining into life, a violet
lotus rising from mud. Yet, even here a barn beguiles him most. The climb to clouds blinding white.

In the end, Paul is alone in his vertigo. From his high-rise at golden hour, to locate so much
as one old mortar wall from his open window. Hear a barn’s romantic notes hush Paul’s
emotional disorder, a spell unnoticeable like growth of a tree overhead. Oh, to go back to the roots
of a remote past. Oh, to find it whole. There a red barn, everywhere a red red.

ξ

Joanne Mosuela was born in Washington, D.C. and raised in Virginia. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Jet Fuel Review, HERE, and Zone 3. She was the runner-up for the 2020 Yawp Poem of the Year award from Brooklyn Poets. She is a graduate of the University of Virginia’s Area Program in Poetry Writing.