from Broke Republic
This is closed-field composition. A wank
Toward the corrugated sky to build one
Musical phrase upon another one bites
The dust, tilled up and remixed. What you
Called life was just an interstitial space
Between sky and ground. Enjoy your time
Here with your Midwest-accented Spanish.
Enjoy our superior plastic containers. Please
Don’t make me say “Latinx” unless it rhymes
With “stinks.” Waves and waves of transcendent
Blue: I’m busy deporting kids with cancer.
There was that one time I called my ex-wife
The Jersey Devil but that was mere jest:
Actual facts involve a kidnapping. Actual
Facts like when I turned down an indecent
Proposal to impregnate her again three years
Later with no promise of being a being. Yet
History, loud marauder, will make her beautiful.
I stand here post-truth, liar, deadbeat, having
No life and nothing to become. There goes
My baby the old song trails off. I dated a girl
Who flirted with: “Why so glum, Charlie Brown?”
Anthony Robinson loves in rural Oregon and is the author of Failures of the Poets (Canarium Books, 2023) and Broke Republic (Green Tower Press, 2025). His favorite historical feud is the incident of fisticuffs that involved Wallace Stevens and the much younger Ernest Hemingway. Things went exceedingly poorly for the portly poet.
