Blur Collar
Ten police & army & American flags
surround one house.
“Don’t tread on me” framed
by antelope skulls. Grinning
martens race through the crops.
The house’s owner: an alpha-hole
I don’t feel like understanding.
Blue collar, blur collar.
Iron cross tattoo, freedom
as subtraction, politician puppetry,
papier mache armies of the night,
bloody neo-Avedons. A new
meaning to doing the nasty.
Exercise fanatics and the exercise
of fanaticism. One flag
reads Trump 202:
A printing era.
Shooter bigots the new cereal
box models, the Iron
Cross man pets your dog.
Enemies are collages.
Snake Year
Democrats have no idea how to
respond. That’s a headline,
not a joke. News cycle,
news cyclone. Ouroboros.
Our dogs look out windows, aged
women in the old country.
The most elegant bridges connect
the least glamorous nabes (Verrazzano).
Pocketbook voters; price of eggs.
One friend dubs another
“a trauma unit.” FOMO
also an animal sentiment.
Those “who vote on inflation” appear
in news’ photos, packed in
steamy delis. The cliché:
you’re counted or
you’re discounted.
Ophidian American fascist calls
his method “muzzle velocity.”
An Iranian film made in secret, against
the regime, a forced indoors
aesthetic, as in my current
mood: I don’t want to
leave my apartment.
Price of eggs. Ouroboros.
We are running out of money.
The rich running
for cover. This really is
the year of the snake.
Alissa Quart is the Executive Director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project and the author of seven acclaimed books, most recently Bootstrapped. Her poetry books include Thoughts and Prayers, available from O/R Books:
