A Poem by Laura Winton

Dustbowl

 

who will mark the day

when you've been dead longer than you were alive

the chickens have come home to roost and the cock

cannot stop crowing his lungs burst as they strain to summon the day

you carry all your worldly possessions in a brown paper bag

 

teach a man to farm teach him to march in rows stand straight when ordered and hide among the crops during the hunt and his napalmed hands will fertilize soft baby skulls, tattoo plaid and pastel flowers onto flimsy flesh           hammers and anvils and drums make music more pleasing than a funeral march the unfamiliar streets will swallow you up before you can build your myth          epic by epic before your tasks are finished and the stables are cleared

 

the prophet saw huge metal birds and resurrected monsters, how we burn ourselves up inside brick and steel solid structures the pyramids will outlive our bleached bones muscle by muscle I melt pulled apart like a wishbone        my empty ribcage still moves by habit after my head flies off

 

there are not enough hands to cover all of your shameful parts

 

the kevorkian babies cry all night chase pigeons with fat pink faces not born of sand and rice paddies their pictures play in courtrooms        the playground becomes a tragic mecca outlined at ground zero, a pinata full of scorpions burn down your temples and churches

 

your god no longer lives there           remember your mother and cry

as your chair falls from the sky

 

 

 

Laura Winton, aka Fluffy Singler is a writer and performer currently living in Minneapolis . She has been writing for more than 25 years and her poetry has been published and performed around the world. She has performed her experimental poetry at the Bowery Poetry Club, the Nuyorican Poet’s Café, and Bar 13 in New York , the Green Mill and Trace Bar in Chicago and at dozens of venues in the Twin Cities. She published Karawane: or, the Temporary Death of the Bruitist, a journal devoted to experimental writers who perform their work, for roughly 10 years. She loves Surrealism and Dada and believes that the Surrealist goal of the liberation of the imagination is the most political act that a writer can perform.