Daniel Nester
The Plan Shifted with a Ferocious Snap
I used to fly off tire swings when I was a kid,
off my gourd on cheap beer. One time I broke
my toe, and I didn’t figure out why till I got home.
As I write this, some dude in baggy pants
walks around the coffee shop holding his laptop
like the ten commandments. He’s turned the speakers on
so he can listen to a radio show about state politics.
He shouts back at the speaker and no one
tells him to shut the fuck up, much less decry
all the politics that passes us by,
all the wounds each of us needs to bring us into ourselves,
how each democracy steals from us.
My cousin’s husband, for example, hunts wild pigs
on a golf course in South Jersey. We’re talking deep
South Jersey, away from both highways,
near the pine barrens where I broke my toe
after I landed too hard. The pigs were abandoned
and went feral, grew stiff hair and horns,
and now roam golf courses, terrifying businessmen
in plaid pants while they tee off. I like to think that
I am a horned beast sometimes, wandering the woods
of our broken country, dodging bullets and poison darts
while bankers shriek into their carts, spill their Arnold Palmers
twenty miles from Whitman’s tacky mausoleum.
One night, driving out in the pines, I shut off the lights
in my car, and took on the highway in the dark, quiet,
unmediated by light or sound or direction.
I had a cold coffee in my hand, and suddenly the glow
from my phone lit up the interior, my child’s face,
and I flipped the headlights back on. I wanted to live.
I have sat in front of my phone for years. I have talked
to young people about their problems, their wishes
to be outside of themselves or back in someone’s arms.
I never once thought I’d want to push myself away.
I know now that no one can wink in the mirror
without someone winking back.
It is, in the end, the worst tyranny I can predict.
Daniel Nester is the author of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects (99: The Press, 2015), How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull Press, 2009), God Save My Queen: A Tribute (Soft Skull Press, 2003) and God Save My Queen II: The Show Must Go On (Soft Skull Press, 2004). He is the editor of The Incredible Sestina Anthology (Write Bloody Publishing, 2012). Nester teaches writing at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY.
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