He’s the most amazing &
already they take him, fate
beautys up the mirror, wonders
how ever one gets used to tighter.
Everything seems to be falling apart at a fantastic rate.
As I sit here typing this letter, Trump (I will not call him the President) has fired the Attorney General, Sally Yates, for saying what we’re all thinking— that he is a lunatic unfit to run a washing machine, let alone a country. People have not stopped resisting, protesting, for ten days. Longer than that, I guess. It seems there is no end in sight. Have you been making calls to your representatives day in and day out? Are you exhausted?
In her body—
Each night a secret circus.
The roaring tiger wears her pink tutu,
reaching her arms fiercely out in front of her
revealing her nail polished claws,
doing precisely and perversely
as she was trained.
You’ll never bring yourself to enjoy the actual
sparrow, only its sound, the idea, its chip,
the pluck to stay when friends migrate.
Julie leaves the coast for the lakes
Cultural history as it begins to be written in the years after 9-11 reveals that the fault-line along the American psyche has become seismically active again. The right-wing is sounding its irrational depths, and suddenly this great National Buddha stirs from its hibernation—out of the blubber of historical lullaby and the sugar plums of paranoia. The collapse of the Twin Towers was a terrible suction event, in which any remaining intelligibility was evacuated from national discourse, like oxygen in a conflagration.
You are tracking a veery
you realize you have always been
after the singing near the excellent sea
You turn on your television in the middle of the night – you can’t sleep again – and start flipping channels. You haven’t been sleeping well lately and you’re not sure why. Yes, you’re quickly approaching your fiftieth birthday and no, you haven’t published that novel or collection of short stories. But you have friends and loved ones and a nice place to live and a job with a health plan. You should be sleeping.
The cows got out again, so Dad drives his rusted bronco through the neighbor’s orange groves.
Headlights catch a spotted haunch of meat; his revolver squeezes juice from unripe, yellow flesh.
The speaker tells us
Olive trees look like
they never wanted to
be trees at all.
You do not know the names of the blossoms. Her breath is the smoking radiator overheated car she turns to laugh & neon hits the dye her hair full of colors
The mall is perverse. It’s a haven to me. Teenage girls look at teal thongs. Young guys with too much cologne offer to massage my hands. I sneak a Cinnabon when I’m supposed to be on a diet. I always see a father at the mall, secretly wishing his toddler would grow up and leave the house. I feel safe. Everything hidden is predictable.
Walter Bumpus was forty-three days shy of his eighty-first birthday when his calendar finally ran out. His last words were less than poetic.
“Not too shabby,” he said, placing his empty dish on the counter. “I think I’ll have that again for dinner. Leave it out and I’ll fix another plate when I get hungry,” he told wife number three, as he shuffled across the linoleum floor stabbing the tile with his cane for traction and stability.
I watched it all. I looked up and saw the whole thing and I didn’t move because I thought it wasn’t real. It just didn’t look real. I watched as one of them fell and when the first cloud of smoke and dust flooded the street, I jerked awake and got inside my truck. But all the soot and ash were too fast and some got inside and I looked outside the window and all I could see was gray. My eyes started stinging and I couldn’t keep them open and I wanted to get out and run, I didn’t want to stay, but I couldn’t leave so I sat there breathing in the remains of the city. Then I heard a boom and the next one fell.
OK, look, about this new administration in Washington D.C…I know it’s frustrating. A lot of you are mad. A lot of you are disgusted, weary, disheartened, bewildered; you want to turn away in despair, turn off the television, stop watching the news, get off social media, retreat from the turn reality and our society appear to be taking.
PLEASE DON’T.
I considered myself a knowing college sophomore. In my world literature survey, out of a class of thirty students meeting once a week in the evening, I understood the homoerotic love on display in Mann’s Death In Venice. I remember my professor’s keener interest when I raised my hand that Monday night and suggested that Aschenbach’s interest in the beautiful Tadzio was more than aesthetic. I was sure I had impressed my classmates, though most of them were taking this particular class just to keep the required English credit to a more harmless weekly event.
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