by Ron Riekki
My French girlfriend says,
“Your President loves all caps,
especially dunce caps,”
loves to yell,
to scream in fifth-grade language
as if everything is a storm,
as if he’ll make porn-$ize money
if all hell breaks loose,
as if we can’t lose,
as if hell
has no empty space,
as if we all won’t suffer
if suffering
becomes the ring
we must wear,
where his words are slapped together
like
WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY
and
the threat
of
NEVER, EVER THREATEN
and
in the mall
my girlfriend points
and says,
“Look, it’s Trump”
and I ask what she means,
And she says,
“An escalator,
that’s what he does.”
Except this escalator
is broken
and she doesn’t even have to say
how much more fitting this is.
 |
| “Thumbs-Up,” by Barry Blitt / The New Yorker cover July 30, 2018 |
My French girlfriend says,
“Your President loves all caps,
especially dunce caps,”
loves to yell,
to scream in fifth-grade language
as if everything is a storm,
as if he’ll make porn-$ize money
if all hell breaks loose,
as if we can’t lose,
as if hell
has no empty space,
as if we all won’t suffer
if suffering
becomes the ring
we must wear,
where his words are slapped together
like
WE ARE NO LONGER A COUNTRY
and
the threat
of
NEVER, EVER THREATEN
and
in the mall
my girlfriend points
and says,
“Look, it’s Trump”
and I ask what she means,
And she says,
“An escalator,
that’s what he does.”
Except this escalator
is broken
and she doesn’t even have to say
how much more fitting this is.
Ron Riekki wrote U.P. and edited The Way North (2014 Michigan Notable Book), Here (2016 Independent Publisher Book Award), And Here: 100 Years of Upper Peninsula Writing (Michigan State University Press, 2017), and Undocumented (with Andrea Scarpino, MSU Press, 2019).
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