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Wake the Fuck Up
Wake the fuck up America, peel your ass
off the faux leather sofa, drop the chips, pry
your finger from the remote
and blink,
just fucking blink. Show some signs
of life, intelligence, anything.
Rip the duct tape from your windows
and ask yourself when,
when did your partially finished basement
become a panic room, when did you smother
everything with plastic, start hoarding canned food,
and at what point exactly
did you think yes, maybe I could
hide the whole family under the pool table,
except the dog of course, she
could fend for herself, didn’t Lassie
always come home anyway, always save the day?
When did you decide it would be best
to avoid public places
and take the family gas mask shopping
instead of to miniature golf?
When did sitcoms become reality TV?
And do you really think anyone
loves Raymond, even in rerun?
Grind your knuckles into your eyes, America,
and wear through that Prozac haze, check
yourself into Betty Ford and kick
that addiction to the vague
and general sense of constant threat
embrace the DTs, the tremors, ride the spasms
in your gut as you heave from the soles of your feet
and if that still isn’t enough, if you still want
something, need something to fear
fear having what remains of your child
drop shipped to you like a broken manikin
in a standard issue pine crate, fear the name
rubber stamped on its return address.
Made in the USA
Candied lips part wordless
like the spindles of her legs, slick
with another’s sweat, burdened
by the weight of a belly not her own,
in her head measuring the time
till it ends.
His conquest, like all others,
another stain on the bed, a stain
barely worth the bill pulled
from his wallet, from behind a photo
of the nuclear family smiling,
so secure in themselves, in their position
beside a row of credit cards, a wife,
two kids, and dog gathered at his feet,
a pillar of the community.
His skin bright as his teeth, not tinged
by any undertone, not like hers
or the yellowed stars, the promises
of the flag kept outside the factory gate,
in sight but out of reach,
it hung over the doorway
where she applied to work, to live
in America, was painted on the ship
that carried her and countless village girls
to this island protectorate, much smaller
than she imagined a great country to be,
and now here, in the backroom
of some offshore brothel, teasing her
from the background of his photo, sewn
into the label of her panties
thrown on the floor, and printed
on the cardboard coffin of her Barbie doll,
bought with a few nights of pain, whose sweet
expressionless face, whose silence,
is all that is required of her.
Morning Light
There is this way that morning light can mingle
with the texture of each day past,
weave patterns from what we leave behind
string together a story like beads
liberated from a necklace
caught in the rush
of throwing your sweater to the floor
where our jeans lie already entwined,
a way it falls from your face
like your hair spread out on the pillow, dusts
the stack of unfinished books
climbing up the bedside
or scans through the blinds
across the dropped legal pad
where we scribbled our day’s ambitions,
then left every item unchecked
where we penned notes to our ghosts,
our future selves, and devised
rituals to banish demons.
Somehow the act of putting ink to paper
makes it all seem so real, fixes it
in time and space
but the morning light has this way
of rendering everything ephemeral
as it washes over the newly turned page,
prepares that emptiness
for me to start all over again.
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