2025 In Review: Three Poems
Where is Smedley Butler?
We live another day in this Republic,
not respirator bed-bound, texting for air,
marked present on the roster,
snatched from Home Depot to a foreign camp.
Time is gauzy. We dream of Spring vaccine,
not your daily Cetirizine placebo,
recalling the year you took tree-line snapshots
on your camera, wondering if each sniffle-cough
(or loose stool) might be your last.
Was it a lab creation or street-food parasite?
Overconfident, unaware the genetic sequence
could be so easily reversed by executive order,
that the test-kits would expire (those you hoarded in the closet)
or the quilted cotton jackets, hidden from aerial recon
(these tiny Yalu ants drawn to your kitchen)
could blow a midnight bugle.
Foxhole-freezing, you vomit chow-line turkey.
Overhead, the gull-wing fighters gifts napalm,
recycled from the last war (as if Peleliu never happened)
its groundwater unspoiled by animal sacrifice
now quench the thirst of the Old Breed.
But masks are still not available.
The bandanna has yet to become a symbol
at car lot protests.
As stocks tank, we form bonus armies on suburban corners,
waiting for the general to return.
What is To Be Done?
(a new American translation)
"With what is perhaps the greatest irony of Russian letters, the novel that the
police helped to retrieve turned out to be the most subversive and revolutionary
work of nineteenth-century Russian literature."
- M. Katz, Introduction.
His eyes, beard, and spectacles ask a simple question
from its simple red, white, and black cover–-
unchanged after each successive printing.
But in 1989, who could have guessed
that we would still be playing Kremlinology now?
The bruised right hand? That bloated limousine face,
fat ankles swaying across the tarmac carpet,
awaiting the handshake of the tsar.
Were the signs so obvious your second in college semester
(textbooks spread out on the rented kitchen table)
like all the life-experience ahead of you, expectant?
Modern Russia: your first upper-level class.
Barely three months after Tiananmen
where in a future geo-personal accident,
you would claim your only daughter.
The Chairman's gaze pierces your shoulders
(the cold November sun, nearly setting)
as you glance back at the Forbidden City,
and scour the stone for a bullet-scar, blood, or tank-sign.
The tour-bus is quiet when we reach the outer ring road.
Did we really think Lady Liberty could survive
the armored personnel carrier or assault rifle?
Was the Starbucks at the end of the tour only imagined?
As the decade ends, Blackhawks will descend
live on basement TV, on your Christmas couch.
The infamous cartoon villain
(once our ally, now orange jumpsuit-clad)
will emerge defiantly from the Hercules,
shackled and whisked to Florida justice,
less history, more first-person shooter
(a genre yet to be invented.)
This Cornell University Press Edition
(a proper paper Soviet relic) is now boxed in storage
only to be recycled and decay in the future, unread.
Advent in September
1
By this ninth month, already much has been snatched away
by their daily terror check-list.
Our tanks are running on empty.
Last December, still in shock,
we strolled past the giant snow globes,
(fans pumping, counting down the incarnation.
A spectacle sponsored by algorithm, co-processor, and conspiracy theory.)
NORAD found Santa kneeling before a floodlit cross.
Deep down, we know who won the war on Christmas.
Their savior appears in a new form, re-imagined
as a Confederate general, riding north,
this Standard Bearer (no Rembrandt)
undefiled by a Greatest Generation bayonet.
Where do the hands of the doomsday-clock lead us?
2
But on this particular evening
(after so much waiting for this moment)
the metallic cart shuffles across the car-lot:
earth is procured, seeds are cradled.
Fourteen dollars, well-spent.
The cashier sweeps and smiles, humming a song from 1987.
“Is that all?” she asks.
You recall the cassette-tape purchase
(your first authentic purchase in months, worth every ringgit)
and taste the shopping mall mee goreng
at the K.L. plaza grand-opening.
In the car, you choose the Wim Wenders U2 track
that foretold the isolation of these media devices.
For the first time in months, the air con is redundant
and even the passing cars seem friendly.
The sky is gauzy, somehow free from late-Summer nostalgia.
The day’s Signal messages dissolve and are forgotten.
No staccato police-range gunfire like each and every morning.
The trowel separates the turf, plunges deep,
surprised to not strike tree-bone.
Apply leverage: the earth is separated and breaks open.
Hands grind and sift the foreign particles.
Small stones, splayed roots and weeds are separated.
Even they cannot take this.
