I will not comply

 

Oregon Trail BY NATE MARSHALL

 Oregon Trail

BY NATE MARSHALL

For my great aunt & Jonathan Hicks

my first venture west was in Windows 98

or Independence, Missouri. class in the computer lab

& we were supposed to be playing some typing game

or another. the one i remember had a haunted theme.

ghosts instructing us on the finer points of where

to put our fingers. these were the last days

before keyboards as appendage, when typing

was not nature. i should’ve been letting an apparition

coach me through QWERTY but rather

i was at the general store deciding between ammo & axles,

considering the merits of being a banker or carpenter.

too young to know what profession

would get me to the Willamette Valley

in the space of a 40-minute period.

i aimed my rifle with the arrow keys, tapped the space

bar with a prayer for meat to haul back to the wagon.

this game came difficult as breathing underwater after

trying to ford a river.

                                        i was no good at survival.

somebody always fell ill or out into the river.

each new day scurvy or a raid was the fate of a character

named for my crush or my baby sister.

this loss i know, how to measure what it means

to die premature before a school period ends.

i can’t understand the game coming to a late end.

an elderly daughter grieving her elderly mother.

reading the expansive obit in a suburban

Detroit church is a confusing newness.

when the old do the thing the world expects

i retreat into my former self. focus on beating

video games I’ve always sucked at, brush up

on Chicago Bulls history, re-memorize

the Backstreet Boys catalog, push

away whatever woman is foolhardy enough

to be on any road with me. i pioneer my way away

from all the known world. i look at homicide rates

& wish we all expired the way i know best. i pray

for a senseless, poetic departure. i pray for my family

to not be around to miss me while i’m still here.

i want a short obituary, a life brief & unfulfilled,

the introductory melody before a beat’s crescendo into song,

the game over somewhere in the Great Plains.

i want to spare my descendants the confusion

of watching a flame flicker slow. keep them from being

at a funeral thumbing the faded family pictures like worn keys,

observing the journey done, the game won, the west

conquered.

Remember the Puns & Brashbrandy by Matt Gonzalez

 

Remember the Puns & Brashbrandy

Matt Gonzalez

for Jack Hirschman (1933-2021) The words always came running out of your mouth Tumbling, galloping Pushing against one another as they took the final turn The last hundred meters Where form is lost  & everyone becomes a futurist Sacred words split into syllables & break apart Yours never had wings affixed to them Only the hammer & sickle  Harnessed with gumshoe & printing press Long gray hair alighting from your form & that gait you had As if you’d been riding motorcycles all night long Bowlegged, rickety even  Probably from kicking fascists in your sleep  & the other death-headed sorts You had the sparkle, loud & lavish laughter Bellowing even A clamor to stoke awake the fires inside & push against the fulcrum of the dreadful state In time, overtaken by the glow & tether of your arcanes Where life mingled with apparitions  It’s how you made memory & the present inseparable Obsecrating all those pages turned  Dog-eared & brittle after a stretch To lay words before us, like crumbs Four thousand pages later Leaving a richer trail I remember the raddled years When you lived like a pauper Grinning wide & showing off your crooked teeth More beautiful than any others The final words I whispered to you That was wonderful  Are still ringing in your ears Though vibrating waves of compression & rarefactions are dust now Just in case, let me say it again That was wonderful

Having a Fight With You Patrick Phillips

 

Having a Fight With You

Patrick Phillips

is like being burned up in a twelfth-floor elevator. Or drowned in a flipped SUV.   It’s like waking with scalpels  arrayed on my chest. Like being banished to 1983.   Having a fight with you  is never, ever less horrid: that whisper  that says you never loved me—   my heart a stalled engine out the little square window. Your eyes a white-capped black sea.

When Struck by Night Luther Hughes

 

When Struck by Night

Luther Hughes

For our new apartment, which my mother may never see since slugging into that old person’s disease—I won’t bring myself to say it in writing—I bought a cactus and it’s beautiful, its soldier-green skin and feline-whiskered dress howls beneath the den light which encourages me to keep my big-boy jeans on. I know I look for answers everywhere. Everywhere there you are with your eyes a war-less country, a privilege we sometimes share. But tonight, there isn’t a country. Just a sky fussing. Anxious music. The classic duty of breath as we binge another episode of What Should I Do When You Want to Die. Sometimes, you fail to love me, I think I say, the math ain’t mathing—but what could you do? You’ve researched plants, I know, to find which could live without much gusto from its human. You pour yourself another glass of vodka, a shot of tequila for me. Who am I to think I’m too good for your anger—you were right… Come, let’s sour our swords together. Come, let morning waltz into our bedroom all cocky-like like it landlords the place. Come, let’s plunge forward, drunkenly in love, grab hold the darkness we become.

Copyright © 2021 by Luther Hughes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 27, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

Yahya Hassan

 

Dada poem

 Really nice to see how you feel Luke buck.

The baby voted for the good of the workers.

You do mind if I call your sister or daughter cute.

The baby is the Archie version of the country in the world.

It is the best of the best.

I thought I was a red flag in the middle of the workers.

You can shave a Chewbacca.

It is a good rebellion and you can not get what you wanted.

It's not get what you're saying.

I'm missing you can live like a new one for a Chewbacca.

If I thought it would have to know about questioning everything else,

The baby voted up for a few months and 1 months later I thought it wasn't the country that was weird.