I Am Not Built for Dead
       

bodies—my people in their tsarist shanties
wouldn't have come seen one, only attending
funerals for their own. They came to this land
of table wakes and windowed typhoid caskets
so I could have a new life mourning
those whose books permit remembrance in
the open light. America: the old bureau
that fell on me when I opened too many drawers.
Someone approach and remove it, please, but not
you or you or you—yes, now I see
everyone good is gone, for everyone good
I've averted my eyes and sung OH LET THE CIRCLE,
and all remaining compatriots are awful:
despots too old to be tried, artists in want
of adulation, the couple where the woman
has a kind of tic and makes a racy comment
every twenty minutes. She sucked off a stranger,
she told me, during a stay in the French Quarter,
and her husband snapped then in her turtle face:
NOBODY CARES. EVERYONE HAS A PAST.

Tweet

Copyright © 2017 Natalie Shapero All rights reserved
from Hard Child
Copper Canyon Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission