What happens after the world ends? In Matt McBride’s 2026 collection of poems, At the Mercy of the Flies, published by Half Mystic Press, McBride traces the moments before, during, and after 2020, from the 2016 election, to the COVID-19 pandemic, and beyond. While At the Mercy of the Flies follows his debut, City of Incandescent Light, published by Black Lawrence Press in 2018, here McBride’s poetic voice emerges anew. Though he remains committed to brevity of language and image, At the Mercy of the Flies is steeped in a sobering kind of melancholic wit. At the Mercy of the Flies arrives as a record both for and of the modern era.
Though At the Mercy of the Flies is cohesive, each of the three sections—“The Mourners Forgot Which Funeral They Were At,” “The Age of,” and “The Party”—is distinct in timbre. The opening section, “The Mourners Forgot Which Funeral They Were At,” arrives at the beginning of the pandemic, and traces an “I” attempting to efface itself. The result is a collage of strange, inverted images, a museum of objects alien from their original purposes. The speaker finds that “[e]xtension cords / wrote drunk signatures / over the surface of the lake” (21), trying to bridge the distance. In a world where “[e]ach day / was its own hospital” (4), time expands and contracts like a piece of paper, lengthened by its own unfolding and refolding: “[y]esterday kept taking longer” (22). No one is exempt from the fact that “[s]tories of scaffolding / skeletoned no buildings” (10), the lack of external structure holding the building together offering an apt metaphor for the precarity of the first global lockdown. There is no concrete protection against unprecedented times. The title, too, reveals that this section is about a loss of innocence upon realizing that mass death is no longer exceptional. In ““The Mourners Forgot Which Funeral They Were At,” McBride depicts the moments before the low hum of grief became the norm.
McBride tells a story of making the most out of dire circumstances, one marked by failures, by tying “plastic bags / over the children’s heads / so they could play astronaut” (11). Here trying to encourage imaginative curiosity becomes a death wish, a reminder of the fragility of childhood. In lines like “I detached my hands / before prayer” (14), McBride suggests that so many of the things we take for granted are felt only in their absence, like the holding of hands. The same lack of recognition of that which is familiar is also true of the self: “I called the me me, / but I called the nothingness / me too” (27). Negational language recurs elsewhere, through “sleep and unsleep” (5), and “the time…spent / not learning piano” (7), “[e]choes” are “louder than what they echoed” (18), and with “more collective nouns / than nouns” (7). Only inversions can adequately render the dislocated strangeness of the present era. Still, the speaker remains “faithful to faithlessness” (27). Even when everything else is uncertain, that the rain will come and continue “its exegesis / on meaninglessness” is a triumph (12). Later in the collection, however, this rain becomes torrential: “Mineral oil rained. / Expired wedding invitations / rained. The inability to tell guilt from memory / rained. Milk rained.” Surgical gloves, cigarettes, and “[s]eeming and a lack of seeming” rain too. Change is as inevitable as bad weather.
Where “The Mourners Forgot Which Funeral They Were At” encapsulates the grief and surprise of early pandemic life, “The Age Of” is much more concerned with middleness in general. In hindsight, the rituals of early quarantine seem funny: “I wore dishwashing gloves / for everything but washing dishes” (39). In this section, enough time has passed that a sense of “before” emerges with a nostalgic valence. We then pass through the “Grass Age” (35), the “War of No Touching” (37), and the “Age of Meaningless Omens” (39). The speaker longs for the time where “[w]e sought / workable flex schedules. // We reported the sea / lost at sea” (35). Again, the loss of simple things are felt only in their absence. No parent would dare let their child play with “[s]even children,” let alone play with a “surgical glove” (35) as a toy during the pandemic. Childhood is different now. So is midlife: in poignant lines like, “I titled a poem / Poem with a Hole in the Middle, // and posted it to my list / of things that happened while I was still alive” (43), McBride problematizes what it means to be in the middle of something, to encounter absence, and to anticipate death, all while striving to find meaning in the present.
With “The Party,” the third section, McBride captures the dissonance of digital culture in the wake of both the pandemic and the 2016 and 2020 U.S. elections. His characteristically short aphorisms grow shorter: “[s]pent extinguishers / left a perpetual fog” (53), tired from putting out so many fires. There is a perpetual state of emergency, and a lack of arrival as “[e]ach moment / opened to nothing” (54). A perfect metaphor for social media arrives in the phrases “[w]e communicated solely by postcards / attached to balloons” (61) and “[w]e used Instagram to make sure / our dreams were consistent” (69). Sending posts into the ether (by way of postcards and balloons) means communication happens faster, but less meaningfully. Nostalgia for an earlier age seeps in—“[w]e admired / the TV’s resolution” (70)—despite that “[w]e couldn’t remember which yesterday / we missed so much” (69). Here McBride illustrates our digital moment, where short form social media content triumphs over things like sitcoms, sitting around the television is a lost art: even a thirty minute episode requires more resolve than mindless scrolling.
The final section concludes with borrowed lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Hollow Men” as the speaker realizes that the worst is yet to come: “Every refrigerator’s hum / dropped an octave, chanting… This is the way the world ends— / it doesn’t” (81). The only thing scarier than the fact that this might be the end of the world is that something more may actually lie ahead. Though Matt McBride’s At the Mercy of the Flies does not arrive at a concrete resolution, it does not leave us without hope. After all, the collection models a practice we can all learn from: that of attending closely to everyday oddities. Here, in an even stranger version of our world, we find a set of tools to help us survive and perhaps even embrace the uncertain future that is to come.