Assignment for America
Now you must go scrub the leviathan, wash the encrusted white
shirt of it, clear out the earwax that has made it deaf.
Be brown-eyed and briefcased. Be ready to roll
up your sleeves. You’ve had a belly full of swindle.
Be dedicated to the proposition that you must
take out your earbuds and come alive. Relearn lessons
you abandoned, caught as you were between forgetting
and negotiating, plunged out of tragic Twenty-Twenty,
when the distance between what was happening
and the routine lie was immense. Go into
the dirty streets, carrying your cleaning supplies.
Ignore the menacing guys outside the building, where
folks you haven’t met yet take exception. Be resolute
as a desk, toss them a smile and begin to disinfect.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of four books and six chapbooks and the 2020 winner of the Phillip H. McMath Post-Publication Award for The Mercy of Traffic (Unlikely Books, 2019).
Header photo by wavebreakmedia, courtesy Shutterstock.
