it’s clear the future does not bode well for the living
my man wont let me forget where leather comes from
the engineered animal bent over in chemical grass
the slit thing hanged & blood slunkskin stripped
& tanned in order to keep a man decenti know
how to keep a manthe belt knows how to keep order
the sound of his unbuckling’s pavloviana sidewalk
split into drooling meat. he beats me into my evening
blush, i clutch pearls, eyes the color of a little red cloak.
bless this bridle wrapped around my throat while he
bloods me, bless the constricted windpipe’s unlikely music
Even before February 28, the reasons for Donald Trump’s imploding approval rating were abundantly clear: untrammeled corruption and personal enrichment to the tune of billions of dollars during an affordability crisis, a foreign policy guided only by his own derelict sense of morality, and the deployment of a murderous campaign of occupation, detention, and deportation on American streets.
Now an undeclared, unauthorized, unpopular, and unconstitutional war of aggression against Iran has spread like wildfire through the region and into Europe. A new “forever war”—with an ever-increasing likelihood of American troops on the ground—may very well be upon us.
As we’ve seen over and over, this administration uses lies, misdirection, and attempts to flood the zone to justify its abuses of power at home and abroad. Just as Trump, Marco Rubio, and Pete Hegseth offer erratic and contradictory rationales for the attacks on Iran, the administration is also spreading the lie that the upcoming midterm elections are under threat from noncitizens on voter rolls. When these lies go unchecked, they become the basis for further authoritarian encroachment and war.
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bless any thing that can be remade to eke out pleasure
from stone, bless all this life thrashing against death’s
garish precipice, o bless me lord, bless me doorman,
bless me cormorant & courtship & torture & husbandry,
give me enough compression to remember i once lived
here & i’ll accept in the end not even death will wife me
Sam SaxTwitterSam Sax is the author of Madness (Penguin, 2017), winner of the National Poetry Series, selected by Terrance Hayes. His second book, Bury It, will be out on Wesleyan University Press in 2018.