Judson Evans
Rent-A-Wreck
Let me tell you about my grandchildren they
are dead, or
I am spending their inheritance on drugs
or oil. I am packing the great multi-compartmental American Tourister™.
Its price is right
below the wastepaper blonde in drag
as Simone Weil. With its four wheels and motor, it’s so much
more than luggage,
so much more than a commodity, a perpetual state of
expansion.
Imagine the universe a balloon buttered with
residue of kittens laced with cyanide. You are its
surface, the stakes of the obese dirigible of your
freedom pop like a string of firecrackers
As long as the evangelists keep shimmying hellfire
pamphlets under your wiper blades, you may continue to imagine
you are inside an intestine with a map of the itinerary, waiting
for the tally of three world historical phases duodenum, jejunum, ileum, bath tub rings of the coral reefs.
Of course we are afraid, but can’t the perimeters be booby-trapped with pesticide or asbestos?
Can’t the mercury shares be stapled to the edges of the envelope?
Can’t the illegal immigrants be drafted into the shopping cart wars of the future?
Luckily, the homeless are backward-compatible with the newly emerging food groups. Blue light has a smaller wavelength so more of our private data may be packed inside poisoned figs. Donkey carts full of the them pass the street where I live, the street where I live…
Poems by Judson Evans have appeared in Pedestal Magazine, Contemporary Haibun Online, Cleaver Magazine, Interim, and Salt Hill Journal, among other journals, as well as in the anthologies New Smoke: An Anthology of Poetry Inspired by Neo Rauch (Off the Park Press, 2009), Viva La Difference: Poems in Response to Peter Saul (Off the Park Press, 2010), and The Triumph of Poverty: Poems Inspired by Nicole Eisenman (Off the Park Press, 2012), all edited by John Yau. After a tenure as director of liberal arts for Boston Conservatory from 1988 to 2015, Judson Evans is now a full-time professor in the Liberal Arts Department at Berklee College of Music in Boston.
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