November 6, 2024
Fine, America, you found a way
to grow apples with razor blades
already inside them. To punch
new holes through our shared lungs.
I thought you were a smudged
mirror, not a guillotine blade rising,
rising as the crowd froths.
But I’m the vole, it seems,
chewing a nest of live wires.
I’m the earwig, the silverfish,
the firebrat. America, you heel
stomp on my scales. I was just
aging quietly in your cupboard.
I left the window cracked
and the air throughout the house
is now bats, their leather wings
and dead eyes ignoring what
I thought was gravity.
I guess let’s breathe these bats
together, America, you ugly
home. Here are two stones;
let’s call them tomatoes. Here
is a shotgun to use as a crutch.
Let’s just accessorize our limp.
Who cares that the fire is green,
America. Who can even hear
when some old scraps of paper
begin to tear? What a silly,
big signature, America. What
a wide-open sky we shot down.
Dan Rosenberg’s books include Bassinet, cadabra, and The Crushing Organ, which won the American Poetry Journal Book Prize. He has also published the chapbooks Berg x Berg x Berg (in collaboration with Ori Fienberg and Zach Goldberg), A Thread of Hands, and Thigh’s Hollow, which won the Omnidawn Poetry Chapbook Contest. His poems have appeared in Conjunctions, The Iowa Review, 32 Poems, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. He co-hosts the Yetzirah Reading Series and teaches at Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, CO.
