Politicians
       

They rely on your forgetting. They forget
themselves, or everything but. Around forever,
always the same, always distancing themselves
from who they were. Like the first secretary
of the regional party committee, in charge
of not adding iodine to the water
after Chernobyl, they aren't criminals
but products of their time. The time is always now,
the river from Pripyat through Flint conveying
the same products, made of cheaper ingredients
in deceptively slightly smaller packages
with new health claims. They want you to buy them.

They don't remember how the refrigerator died
one summer and they didn't get a new one
for a biblical seven years—maybe a few weeks,
they say now, unwilling to look at the proof,
the email where we refused to come home
until they bought a new one. My guess is it's
the suggestion of influence they mean to block out,
not the seven years they bought bags of ice
daily to keep a carton of milk from souring
in the freezer, and every so often a few pints
of Graeter's they ate all at once as it softened.
But the seven years had to go, too. It's a process....

They couldn't decide what kind to get.
Most of the new ones were bigger and didn't fit.
Double doors, freezer on bottom, ice dispenser,
novelties they shelved as too radical a change.
We don't like the new one when we visit,
we can't reach things, rummaging, we bump our heads,
it takes up too much room but doesn't hold enough.
We haven't forgotten what the old one was like
or what sat where on the shelves: the Velveeta box
and pimento olives, Aunt Jemima's syrup
and Smucker's jam and gallon jugs of skim milk,
and margarine and D cheese, we called it, for its shape.
The Peter Pan in the cupboard never got old.

We're spoiled—now they stock our leafy greens
and grass-fed butter, the bread drawer rolls out
Great Harvest loaves instead of Roman Meal,
and in the cupboard low-sodium Progresso
pushes out Campbell's. That's progress. It feels like progress
until you look for a functioning can opener.
But I understand, with all due respect, why people
vote for their parents anyway. Because
you know them, they aren't so bad anymore,
they let you forget yourself They were never that bad.
Though didn't they—did they really?—rent a car
every day for fifteen years, when theirs died?

They laugh.

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Copyright © 2020 Rebecca Starks All rights reserved
from Time Is Always Now
Able Muse Press
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission