life's little ironies

No One Cares Much What Happens to You






when Serbs get mad, they talk
about a small town like Grace

 Stop laughing; I’m serious
 Grace is all I can afford on my nursing home wages

  I pity her for the thankless job of building
  A nation of Americans conceived in petri dishes

   Whores are disposable.
   They get strangled, beaten, tortured, raped...

    on old motels, diners, train stations, or whatever,
    and I think about Capri Sun bags when it happens.

     As he unzips his pants I realize that I’m
     what happens to us when the curtain goes down

      no one cares much for the body parts
      murderer creeping up behind her

        Look, poetry, painting, writing. . .
        People don’t get it like they should.

        But it exists because it’s a link to what we can
        accomplish through our Academic Plan

         no matter how public it all seems
         there’s a forced casualness to this conversation

          I’ve been out here shooting long enough
          I know even a public toilet will net you jail time

           because when it comes to that word, “nigger,”
           — I know that this is illegal —

     it’s like the emergence of yet another guilty, white Southern male
        as the fat lady continues to sing,

                  “when they were first created the thing
               was to make them as white as possible”

             as long as we are laughing
           at Rush Limbaugh’s addiction

         remember that Mt. Rushmore was itself
the creation of an ardent member of the Ku Klux Klan




                                   Katie Degentesh