Mr. Butterchips breaks new ground in his fight against Donald Trump.
INTERVIEWJohn Grochalski
"What Trump does angers me but never surprises or shocks."
The Nazis are back in town.
No, I know. They never, ever left.
2016, it's not funny anymore.
The things I never said, I said them like a man.
Like a man I insist I never said those things.
And afterwards I will assert I never said the second thing,
layer on layer of vow, disavowal. And what I believe,
you shall believe; there is only one thought and it is me.
My smell wipes across the thought of him. Crying in a pin stripe business suit. There was an accident. Perfect bodies lose perfection like melting ice. Crowns of thorns are passed out, metal trinkets to place in private. Kiss the blood rolling down.
I keep having this dream where
the white man isn’t angry
the black man entered
the white house.
There is a cabin by the bouldered beaches
of Northern California,
where the pines practically toe the foam.
This is where he’ll go, and off will come
his tailored suits,
his lacquered shoes,
his streak of blood-red tie.
She’s been sitting in the passenger seat of my car for a week.
She won’t wear her seatbelt and she won’t come in at night.
The pounding in Amana’s temples won’t let up, and it’s beginning to scare her. She has had headaches before, but this is something different—it feels like some kind of creature has invaded her body and is occupying every square inch of it, from the tips of her fingers, which won’t stop tingling, to the pit of her stomach, which feels like it is being stretched and twisted and kneaded like bread dough.
We are the easy targets
to the men who hide behind
the thin veil of life
the men in Washington
who pretend that they care.
It’s nice to scream
“This is what democracy looks like”
With a hundred people you’ve never met before.
Of course we knew what was at stake.
We all had that pill between our teeth
the gelatin cap
would not burst
no matter how hard we bit down
My daughter calls from upstate where they sell gray gourds.
She says things are happening too fast, says we’re fucked.
In today’s society, we often take great pleasure in putting down our enemies. One especially fun way to do that is to compare them to despised or disgusting things. If a teacher is too strict, the he or she is like a boring BDSM master or mistress. If a roommate is lazy, then he or she is a useless pile of crap. Because both of my parents worked in education, my natural enemy is the Republican Party. And so, to get in on the fun, I will say that the current Republican Party is like Keyser Soze from the film The Usual Suspects.
Dead Democrats scratch their bones
and wait but there’s no real time to roll over.
The caskets closed, no reason to push open
wooden tops against dirt, heavy
A man,
prostrate,
fingers on his hands splayed
spat gum engrained
in the lines of his fingerprints.
I am here cuz I am too Mexican for Americans too American
for Mexicans & too feminine for masculine, I am here cuz even as bodies keep dropping
jails keep maxing & whites keep robbing, these large brown hands with nail polish
will rise & fist up for freedom for revenge for tradition & for that little queer brown boi
that has yet to be born.
The business man will sign his name
a certain number of times in his long,
dry-cleaned life. $500 pens in his breast
pocket. How many signatures?
Others take his measure.
Not even a Cyclops can stop him from shoving
folks out of his way, cutting to the front of the line.
A master of the proxy fight and poison pill,
his greenmail raids are sure to kill or leave enemies
quaking, immured in handcuffs of tarnished gold.