by Karen Schubert
If you were the god you believe in
what planet would you make? Me, I like this one,
but I think I’d talk to my humans,
say something like imagine
you are walking around in a world
I made for you. Clean up the air, the ground.
You’re making your own kids sick.
It won’t be easy so get started.
Tough love. Then once they did that,
who knows what else?
If I had a company maybe
I’d say, hey, I can’t run this place
myself so if you help me run it, I’ll help you
thrive and we’re in this
together. If I had a state
and I knew some schools were,
you know, the way some schools are,
maybe I’d go there, talk and talk
until everyone said, ok, ok, we hear you
and everyone picked up books,
the parents, the teenagers, even the little kids,
they’d picked up newspapers, too,
I’d make sure they all got what they needed
to help me run the state.
I’d tell them, that’s the way it is
in a democracy, you gotta help. If I had an income,
in April I’d pay my taxes. I’d say
I love this country, and I want to do this
thing to make it strong on the inside.
No more wars, dirty air,
working poor, kids who can’t read.
Wait a minute, I already do that,
pay my taxes, that is.
And I’d write a song, I’d call it Utopia
or Wisconsin, whatever name we want,
and we could sing it together. One line is
we might not get there, but let’s go towards it.
Let’s just go.
Karen Schubert is the recipient of a 2012 Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award in poetry. Her poems, interviews and essays appear or are forthcoming in the Review Review, Best American Poetry blog, riverbabble, AGNI Online, Knockout Literary Magazine and others. She is the author of Bring Down the Sky (Kattywompus, 2011) and The Geography of Lost Houses (Pudding House, 2008). She lives in Youngstown, Ohio, among poets and artists and some beautiful sculpted bike racks, and she teaches English at Youngstown State University.
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