Overread at Table One: Poem for a National Emergency

Poem for a National Emergency

Two weeks into the so-called National Emergency,
nothing had changed. Nothing from before.

We lived our lives as though everything was fine.
The sun still shone on the same-old same-old.

We went to work. We went home.
We ordered stuff from Amazon that we did not need
(two day delivery with Prime, you know)

We watched whatever Netflix told us to watch.
We talked about the upcoming season of Game of Thrones.

We got laid … or not.
If we didn’t get laid, we jerked off in the shower.

We posted to Facebook and Twitter and IG and
we pretended that our opinions actually meant something.

We talked about things as though we were experts.
In all our conversations, we pretended confidence and composure.

We got haircuts. We got our nails done.
We took the kids to baseball practice.


No Guatemalans stole our jobs.
No Hondurans took our tax dollars.
No Mexicans parked taco trucks in our yards.
No Salvadorans raped our daughters.

Instead, they stood beside the walls of corner stores,
waiting to be picked up for day labor, or else 

they stayed out of sight, picking lettuce
in the rotting fields of dying farms.








MR
2019-0227