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Letter to America
by Elizabeth Jacobson

One Poem

America, Here We Go Again!

On the first day of the 45th administration I rallied at Bayside,
not wearing a pussy hat like the ralliers in D.C.
This was south Florida, so I made a pussy shirt instead
with pointy ears where my breasts would have been,
if not for you, America, and the radioactive sewage
dumped from Turkey Point into the Biscayne aquifer
from which I drank, naively thinking,
that someone out there was paying attention. 

How I didn’t clue into the recurring dream I had for four years:
my breasts on fire, both of them aflame, and then in the dream,
turning black, ashing up like the burning end of a cigarette.
Isn’t all this part of our national sensibility of an other?
Who is that solemn man, America, from another country,
tip-toeing around at night, pouring buckets of hot waste
into a canal for $10 an hour, the fingers of his hands covered
only with canvas gardening gloves as he goes about his chore,
not telling anyone when his skin, like butter melting off an ear of corn,
falls from his arms?

In the Environmental/Spiritual Healing section of Books & Books,
I met a woman who uses an I Ching app on her phone to guide
her through the hard parts of a day. Like when it was announced
that 45 hung 22 karat gold leaf curtains in the oval office. Or when
he reduced Bears Ears by 85% for energy exploration and mining.
Trust me, the POTUS said, I’m like a smart person. 

I had been flipping through a book about the 17th-century naturalist
Maria Sibylla Merian, who taught the world that insects did not
spontaneously emerge from mud, as previously thought,
but have complex life cycles of birth and death: It wasn’t ladylike,
the men scientists said of Merian, the way she depicted a giant spider
devouring a hummingbird. When I looked up from the book, the woman
with the I Ching app insisted that I try it.
I tapped six times on the image of three ancient coins
and my providence came up in ideograms:
49 Revolution – Devotion to truth enables a revolution.
63 After Contemplation – Good fortune unfolds for those who remain
on guard against inferior influences.

America, you hilarious bitch; Here we go again!
He’s coming back as 47. Someone made a sign that says
We Shall Overcomb which I saw on Facebook and “liked,”
and also today, there was a picture of the pres-elect,
his face composed of raw salmon,
a white fleshly flounder fillet for the toupee,
with anchovies for eyebrows and peppercorns for eyes.  This picture
received ten million “likes” and went viral from all the repostings. 

When I was a child I loved to look at the 50 stars in the navy box
on our American flag, which, by the way, is called the union—
representing independence and justice. I used to lie on my back
in the front yard, holding a small flag up to the sun, counting
the stars over and over again. To me they looked like those flavorless
candy dots I ate from long white paper strips,
the paper never fully coming off the back of each small candy,
and a spitball would form in my mouth, which I spat
onto the trunk of the maple in my front yard. The waste
collected over time, so my mother called a pest control company
who fumigated this strange collection of insect eggs on the bark,
killing the shit out of the paper, and then the tree.

 

 

    

Elizabeth JacobsonElizabeth Jacobson’s third collection of poems, There Are as Many Songs in the World as Branches of Coral, is just out from Free Verse Editions/Parlor Press. Her previous book, Not into the Blossoms and Not into the Air, won the New Measure Poetry Prize, selected by Marianne Boruch (FVE/Parlor Press, 2019), and the 2019 New Mexico-Arizona Book Award for both New Mexico Poetry and Best New Mexico Book. Her other books include Her Knees Pulled In (Tres Chicas Books, 2012), two chapbooks from Dancing Girl Press and Everything Feels Recent When You’re Far Away, Poetry and Art from Santa Fe Youth During the Pandemic (2021), which she co-edited. Elizabeth was the fifth poet laureate of Santa Fe, New Mexico and an Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellow. She is a reviews editor for Terrain.org. Find her recent work at linktr.ee/ElizabethJacobson.

Read more poetry by Elizabeth Jacobson in Terrain.org: “Allegory with Fiestaware” and “Landscape with Ordinary Things.”

Header photo by forhad sikdar99, courtesy Shutterstock.
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