Non-Committal Political Poem

New York Red
Bulls versus New
England Revolution

counter-pressures
before pressure
a trophy
atrophies
as my friends tend the daisies say –

           “don’t eat your ancestors”
           “that cloud’s been an ocean”
           and “today there’re wicked mites”

“wicked”
meaning wonderful wizard

“mites”
meaning small magic cutting just
to cut against
unchecked power

“wicked mites”
meaning small magic animal
cutting against
unstudied geometry of the ship as it sinks

and “we now play their game over here”

money pours in from the middle
America, someone else’s
zinc pours from the mouth

“A thirst for power is drinking sand”

 

  All this material
      conversion
without ornamentation –

We are all what part of the world
                               A bubble grid
poised on tongued gongs
of Reginald Fessenden,
of Gunga Din

another buck in the machine
a flake of poison oak

         A dead duck
        is bit like
         an old hat

(the first lesson I believe
is how it wraps me in)

No such thing as cold
No such thing as hell
No such thing as ADHD
No such thing as race
No such thing as Palestine
No such thing as ghosts
No such thing as luck

 

Photography © Allison Goldin

Photography © Allison Goldin

 

Andrew K. Peterson is the author of two full-length poetry collections, some deer left the yard moving day and Museum of Thrown Objects (both published by BlazeVox Books). His chapbook bonjour meriwether and the rabid maps (Fact-Simile Press, 2011) recently appeared in an exhibition on poets’ maps the University of Arizona’s Poetry Center. He edits summer stock, an online poetry journal, and lives in the Boston area.

Allison Goldin is an artist living in California. Her work is a collection of spontaneous drawings from the imagination. The most common link throughout her art are the semi-recognizable creatures scattered amongst and bringing together the surrounding doodles.