Come November
come
cold eye corrective, come pendulum
take wrecking ball to venerable walls
come cerulean wave, come
typhoon earthquake tsunami
blow the gentlemen from
utahiowasouthcarolinakentuckymaine
back to higher ground
or (better yet) homeward
to the distant shores
that spawned them
washed up jobless uninsured
come classic EF5 tornado
good ol’ midwestern tradition, come
barn-splintering wedge of gale force winds
come vacuum up this mess of a land
rip the flimsy scrims from the chambers
where black-robed justices
work their corrupted levers these days
it’s tempting to curse biblical—
to call down pestilence, plague, a pox upon
both houses & the thundering hooves of horsemen—
instead, embrace November’s wintry grip
november come inevitable
november come early & often listen
can you hear that ticking
like fingertips of sleet
upon window panes—
it’s the clicking of check-marks
in ballot boxes
the coming blizzard
of millions.
Debra Marquart is the author of six books including Small Buried Things: Poems (2015), The Horizontal World: Growing Up Wild in the Middle of Nowhere (2007), and a co-edited anthology of experimental writing, Nothing to Declare: A Guide to the Prose Sequence (2016). A professor of English in the MFA Program in Creative Writing and Environment at Iowa State University, Marquart is the senior editor of Flyway: Journal of Writing & Environment. She also teaches in the Stonecoast low-residency MFA program at University of Southern Maine and performs with her jazz-poetry, rhythm & blues project, The Bone People.Header photo by everst, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Debra Marquart by Thomas Rice. Music track with audio reading: “Water” by Peter Manesis.
