“Rips Tears and Lines of Power No 2” © Bonnie Matthews Brock

 

My Birthday is Now January 6

They used to laugh at me when I would say
I remember the exact moment of my birth.
I would say it as an icebreaker at parties,
and then watch as the polar caps would shrink
in whoever’s living room we were in, watch as people
went for their keys ‘cause I’d turned their good time
into the saddest msnbc-flavored seminar you ever saw.
But I’m here to tell you now
to Hell with the birthday I was given;
after seeing thousands of Americans
strike the first blow against the foreign country of America
I realize now that I’ve never seen a god-damned thing
until I saw the rotunda filled with the redneck afterbirth
of the living, undead South, the bloody spittle dribbling from a riot
          cop’s mouth.
My birthday is now January 6, and the only thing I can mean by that
is that I’ve had to reboot the meanings of good and bad in me,
I’ve had to delete U.S. History; how in the Hell
can any of us be the same person we were before?

 

Rich Boucher resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Rich is BOMBFIRE Magazine’s Associate Editor, and he is the author of All Of This Candy Belongs To Me. He loves his life with his love Leann and their sweet cat Callie.

Bonnie Matthews Brock is a Florida-based photographer, as well as school psychologist. She enjoys capturing raw single-capture photos of a wide variety of subjects, and learning and experimenting with shooting techniques such as long-exposure and intentional camera movement, as well as with editing methods. You can find Bonnie’s images on the covers of publications such as Ibbetson Street, Poesy Magazine, and Wild Roof Journal, and on the pages of Oddball Magazine, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, Ember Chasm Review, Beaver Magazine, and Unstamatic. Her works are archived at institutions such as Poets House NYC, Brown University, University of Buffalo, and Harvard University.