Chitra Ganesh, How to Assemble a Flying Car (detail), 2018, linocut on tan BFK Rives. Courtesy of the artist & Durham Press.
O, What a Beautiful Morning
In this rabid world of religious wars
and Hummel figurines you squat your fitball
& wolf down those pretty handfuls of bunker-
busters your doctor Fed-Ex’d for the ninth
time this month O, by now he knows
you’re a pathetic (but fast-pay) little
loser & hell everybody knows it—though
through your early morning fog, your “personal
best” you seem to give a fuck less and isn’t it fun
to play Find the Car in your garage, then
off you go to totter from the pump to the Food
Mart at the Conoco & how it feels just like
crossing between cars on a speeding Amtrak
train set to derail sixty miles south of Chicago
in Dwight, Illinois, in a howling blizzard
& the bad part is everyone aboard is knocked
shit-stupid like Beanie Babies, gets dismembered
& dies except you picking yourself up & staggering
off to the Antique Mall where a hand-scrawled
note taped to the window says “CLOSED
You Sick Little Cunt We’ve Been Waiting
For You All Morning Long Come Back
Tomorrow We’ll Have Freshly Made Fudge”
Robert Nazarene is founding editor of MARGIE and the Intuit House Poetry Series, which published the winner of the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry. He is the author of two collections, Church and the forthcoming Bird in the Street. His poems have appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal, The Journal of The American Medical Association, The Oxford American, AGNI, Salmagundi, and elsewhere.(updated 4/2016)