Translocations
Outlining our collective journey through the disease, where to begin?
We picked up the contagion from the Tigris and Euphrates miasma,
inspired to wade and invade by grainy footage of Omaha Beach
and Buchenwald that was taped over video of My Lai and La Moneda
Fed on stories of African cake, meetings in Prague, blue speeches,
and the mathematical promises of exiled bankers that said our coalition
would equal liberators, we landed and grew, shocking the rivers
to secure oily nodes, and allow antiquities to see the new light of day
After the awe of ashes and the twisting of empty bronze statues,
new growths spread to match our tendrils, the swelling of franchises
pledging allegiance to this or that black banner and bandana,
a return to the old-fashioned values of slavery and iconoclastic pillage
And at home? Memory of the lies, while forgetting the peddlers
who sold them between paper and screen, no credit given either, to those
who understood all that we were breathing in and blowing off
second-hand through the cuneiform lands of angry copper merchants
Years of mutations later, one country cannot stop its internal bleeding,
and another is haloless after dropping doses of depleted uranium,
in both lands, protestors swell and militias attempt to pacify under the hum
of drones metastasizing into weapons of democratic destruction
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El Grito de Decatur Street
floored again in the galleries with my bare bones on display,
my emotional coalition refuses to chip in an organ,
instead they ask why I returned
striving in a capitalist sense of course! but only getting rich
to live modestly via thrift and associated markets,
financial gain is one of my lowest points
preferences for moon chasing were once noted and rejected,
today is all about living just enough for a place
to smack into stories real and unreal
looking forward to the day’s love and strangeness, at night
I make art in order to imagine not making art,
anything to fit in my foster community
so, now is the time for consideration and a mission statement:
I know you’re likely bombarded, but like and share,
who knows what I might do as a virus?
on that note, I move to cover my web operating costs, please
donate quails and bells for my issue, the plot thickens
on its own in this damp apartment
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BEN NARDOLINI is a theoretical MFA candidate at Long Island University. His work has appeared in Perigee Magazine, Door Is a Jar, The Delmarva Review, Red Fez, The Oklahoma Review, Quail Bell Magazine, and Slab. Follow his publishing journey at mirrorsponge.blogspot.com.