Imagined Community
V. Joshua Adams
1.
Lacy, leafless Chinese elms
canopy a man in brown.
Public housing trailers peel
but the home for sex offenders
has fresh paint on its pickets.
Up and down the sidewalk
women pick up trash in sweats,
faces older than their limbs suggest.
A couple parks, and watches them
from a lipstick eighties Coup de Ville.
The Hamlet overture ties us
to its gloomy strings, while, to front
a shiny pair of chrome nuts
dangles from a pickup.
2.
Bruise parka, fleece acqua:
Persian doll-face kittens dance
over greys and pinks
made where by whom from what
smashed noses short
(but not too short).
Exhaust rattles the heat-shield & blanches the crabgrass.
Chain-link
moats the school. Children file, one finger to their lips,
another in the air.
what skies await, what seas
Bloodshot, wind-blind, blacktop soaks
a cracked rubber sole
to the cardboard underfoot.
3.
Change the radio. Enough Tchaikovsky.
Sonorous voice: Much of Aleppo has been leveled.
Sonorous voice: The civilians were being evacuated on buses to the countryside
but the buses were shelled instead.
Clatter of accent, pitch. Civilians on the radio now,
men and women shouting, slicing up static
with stories. Bombed-out hospitals. Limp bodies.
Change the radio. Enough civilians.
"Forget the hearse, cause I never die." Yes.
4.
The tetrahedron is a mega church.
Outside, the sign says HAVE A BLESS DAY
every day, to the brownfields, dueling car washes,
& blinking Payday lenders.
A broad avenue drops sidewalks to ditches.
Past the old ice tower flaking stone
a white stretch pulls a horse trailer.
At home there are checks, paperwork, dishes.
Cardboard boxes full of unused toys.
A letter from Iceland describing the minimum criteria.
A stack of Victorian Living
piles on An Intimate History of Humanity.
V. Joshua Adams is the author of a chapbook, Cold Affections (Plan B Press, 2018). Work of his has appeared or is forthcoming in Posit, Painted Bride Quaterly, Mud Season Review, Jet Fuel Review, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. He teaches literature and writing at the University of Louisville.
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