A poem-a-day protest against the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House
Anna Van Lenten
Inauguration Over, the Smiths, the Beatles, and Shakespeare Gather in the Gowanus Whole Foods Parking Lot
The Gowanus Whole Foods parking lot, nth family shop.
It’s February, 2025, and there’s everything to love
and to lose. (Try to remember, the genome’s predictive power
is very low—five or ten percent.)
You clasp close the safety belt, gather a chestful of air
for home. A tsunami of heat and light spills into the body of the car
and yours with it.
The windshield glass, with its loving fingers, rakes the fur of your fatigue.
Once again, you fall asleep in the Whole Foods—
—PAUSE—
for 11 minutes, doze as a lioness who once upon a time
prowled the bars at a zoo, her ferocity forgiven but not forgotten.
Somewhere your spirit animal stretches, opens an auspicious eye.
Meat is Murder on the radio. Your planet’s smithy,
befouled, needs a power wash.
What did you get?
Honey Bear $3.00
Brown Cow $4.13
Blue Herring $4.94
Blood Orange $1.26
So many animals in money—blood even. Rejuvenating.
The negotiations you make to ingest one…be one.
But you were extracted from inside one
a swaddle for a parachute.
So, it took half a lifetime to learn how to crash,
only to find all along
it was a test, dummy test.
Take five, this time with feeling.
This term’s going to be rough, kids, fasten your seat belts.
Still, even Obama killed thousands—did his dead feel less?
Ah but he did it remote—so elegant, so fine—Michelle knows:
Sleep pretty darling, do not cry, and I will sing a lullaby…
Above all do no harm / To live is to harm:
No math will square that circle;
descend, aliens—show us the way (telepathically of course).
Because words…sigh.
What to dream of?
Diamond-star specials in the asphalt,
the air gusts with snow-sparkle puffs…
Always, your need for out-of-body experiences;
this world puts price tags on everything
—always the need for more courage, for right words right order.
Read less.
Read more.
Exiting the lot (fault lines everywhere, and you ready to fight)
you learn BBC reporter Fergan Keane
has discovered the secret to a happy life.
Fresh memory—at the Gowanus Canal drawbridge with your daughter
February, 2017 (that election):
she closed her eyes for two seconds / you clicked.
(The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, As daylight doth a lamp.)
And the Canal cruised past, oblivious—
emptying itself then re-filling,
week in, week out, like we must do now.
Anna Van Lenten is the communications coordinator at the Center for Photography at Woodstock. She curated a highly regarded series of photography exhibits at the Half King bar and restaurant in New York from 2010 to 2019. In 2016 Van Lenten founded LightField, an arts organization in the Hudson Valley, producing multimedia exhibits in New York and Dubai. Her essay about Gerda Taro and Lee Miller appeared in Musee Magazine. She holds an MFA in fiction from The New School.
Indolent Books and editor Michael Broder are back with another poem-a-day series as a creative response to the threat posed to our democracy by the current occupant of the White House. The plan is to continue for all 1460 days of the 47th American presidency.
Find out how to submit poems or flash prose pieces to Second Coming.
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