Before leaving me in charge of her clowder of cats,
Avis took all of them for one last walk behind the trailer park.
I’ve forgotten how the cats and I fared that week in the trailer,
but I’ll never forget that day in the meadow,
the cats following their owner among the tall grasses,
a spectacle silhouetted in the setting sun,
the tips of 11 tails sticking up in the air.
Facebook post
sprinkler rainbows
#feelfreefloatingunassociatedguilt
French for “hobbyhorse”
Russian for “yesyes”
Stir it melt it congeal it
Hugo Ball:
I let the vowels fool around
so I can ae and o you
so I can delay weed
wacking the driveway
so I can unfold the laundry
Tzada Tzarin:
Intelligence is an organization like any other
infiltrate create guerilla cell structure
in gorilla cell shots ring out
cells perish and monkey man
posts dewdrops
like rainbows
on Facebook
to my Muslim brothers and sisters—
it seems like nary a decade
my people sat in the chair
you’ve been strapped to,
painted evil colors, waterboarded
by American imaginations,
extracted from stories
told by angry old men
at dinner tables
across the Midwest
in movies my people
congregated like rats
in fur hats, fingering
big red buttons, gathering
around samovars, plotting
destruction in the abstract,:
Freedom, the American Way,
Democracy, the color White,
and probably Baseball,
but all we did was line up
for bread or salo or maybe
(yes)
a pint of vodka
to help warm winter bones
but we too sang songs,
read Sherlock Holmes
to our children before bed,
tinkered with circuits
in moldy basements,
claimed a Russian
invented the helicopter
(Sikorsky)
but that’s just vanity—
the best evidence
of humanity
now you occupy
that unwelcome seat—
it cannot remain vacant
lest America forget
that fear is optional,
that love is easy,
and I wish I could sit
in your stead, present
my arms as proof
we all bleed red and blue
