Today's poem is by Jennifer MacKenzie

Everyone in America
       

I am not writing about the hallowed pauper dead
as E imagines, the ditches of les pauvres
sewn into their shrouds. I am singing
how much I want Iva as a ship sailing homeward

In quarantine the graveyard has become a routine frequency
I could listen under. What is withheld mellows
deepens the bass. What was shallow unfurls to depths
the obscure and extravagant world of phantasms

Sometimes I feel I'm on my own trampoline
and other people are like WTF. The disjointed patria
opens things up imaginatively while stealing everyone's labor

My sister says these shapes make the work
that needs to happen pretty unwieldy

A murmur of swallows is an entity
that forms out of thousands of birds. No order
only ever ordering unfolding and unfixed

Bureaucracies are the opposite: made to get stuck
She wishes justice was a verb so it wouldn't

Everyone in America has a dog and a therapist
says "Juliano". Because they're all crazy
His real name is Elias but he passes for Italian

I eat a small key lime pie covered in dark chocolate
and imagine fondling handfuls of loose diamonds
I forgive the bittersweetness of my contraband
fantasia. But my toxic telepathy's not working

Whose silence is more culpable and more obdurate
Whose panic is more petty brinkmanship
Whose jealousy is more interminable rue and resignation
to a miniscule life (this message has no body)

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Copyright © 2023 Jennifer MacKenzie All rights reserved
from Conduit
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission