Pamela Sumners
Joker
For the artistic and educational purposes of you look sad,
I have arguably violated our nation’s copyright laws to post
for you a song about the pompitous of love when I don’t
know what a pompitous is but I may sort of just a little
know what love is and I know that it’s not Christ throwing
the little old ladies with diabetes into the Hunger Games so
the money-changers can run amock in the Temple of Commerce
And I just read the state health department telling us, against
the inclinations of the Governor of this the Show-Me bone-
headed literalist state, in terms as stark as they are metaphorical,
“It’s not even the tip of the iceberg of what we can see. It’s like
the tip of Jupiter.” I read that the captain of the unsinkable ship,
the Titanic, and then Our Captain of the ship of state, struck the tip,
just the tip of the metaphorical and actual Jupiter iceberg before
they even saw it.
—Submitted 03/28/2020
Originally appeared in Poetry in the Time of Coronavirus (2020), edited and published independently by G.A. Cuddy.
Pamela Sumners is the author of a chapbook, Finding Helen (forthcoming from Seven Kitchens Press), and the full-length collection, Ragpicking Ezekiel’s Bones (forthcoming from UnCollected Press). Her work has appeared in Ucity Review, Mudlark Posters, Eunoia Review, Shot Glass Journal, Streetlight Magazine, and other journals, as well as in the 64 Best Poets anthology from Black Mountain Press for both 2018 and 2019, chosen by the editors of The Halcyone literary review. Sumners lives in St. Louis with her wife, son, and three rescue dogs, and works as a constitutional and civil rights lawyer.
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