Joanna Fuhrman
To a New Era
Fuck you with your tufts of violence
growing above your groin
with your busted lip called media
and your automatic, gilded
imitation-platinum blade-studded cock ring,
encircling a planet you’re ready to destroy.
The Old Era may have been a fragment
floating in an ocean of private prisons,
chicken-shit rivers, and remote
controlled wars, but it smelled like lilacs
and artistically-sourced lattes
and it knew how to read on a 12th grade level.
Unlike you who reduces Wollstonecraft’s
Vindication of the Rights of Women
to a garbled idiom tattooed in micro-script
above Frankenstein’s monster’s blazing pee-hole.
Please, gods of sunlight and morning naps,
goddesses of semicolons, give us
another chance to welcome in
the better angels of nurture,
to open our arms wide enough that our flesh
becomes a stained-glass house
the exile can find comfort in and recreate
out of whispers and tulip hearts.
Let our desire for kindness be larger
than the sickness of our fear.
Joanna Fuhrman is the author of five books of poetry, most recently The Year of Yellow Butterflies (Hanging Loose Press 2015) and Pageant (Alice James Books 2009).
SUBMIT to the Transition Project via our SUBMITTABLE site.