after Wallace Stevens
1.
Among fifty serious issues
The only one moving
Was the black president’s middle name.
2.
I was of a hysterical mind
Like Fox News
In a country with a black president.
3.
The black president shot hoops in the watermelon sun.
It was a small moment in the nation’s delusion.
4.
The Tea Party and a Muslim
Are one.
The Tea Party and a Muslim and a black president
Are one.
5.
I do not know which to fear more,
Those who say
They want our country back
Or those who admit
They hate a president who is black.
6.
A handgun was brought
To the Town Hall meeting.
The silhouette of the black president
Imagined in the crosshairs.
The desire
Curving the wicked grin,
A terrifying glare.
7.
O madmen of Trump,
Why do you still seek a birth certificate?
Do you not see how, in one capacious pocket,
A black president carries
All nations?
8.
I too had heard the sermons, listened to the worthy dream
Of the doomed prophet, the dead preacher;
But I dreamed, too, that the black president
Had also heard his words.
9.
When a black president took office
It marked the end
Of several beginnings.
10.
At the sight of a black president
Speaking in the Rose Garden light,
Bloggers and other related bastards
Would cry out falsely.
11.
She floated above the tundra
In a wolf-hunting dirigible
From which she imagined refudiating a terrorist.
Later, she misunderestimated
The shadow of her pregnant daughter,
Thinking it was a black president she could see
Across the bay in Russia.
12.
The tide ebbs.
The wind sits in the shoulder
Of the black president’s sail.
13.
It was summer all winter.
It was far too warm
And it was getting warmer.
The black president sat
In the hottest spot of all.
Peter Krass teaches at the Writers Studio in New York and online, and he's also a freelance writer and editor. His poetry has appeared in Rattle, CommonLine Journal, and elsewhere, and his poem "All Dressed in Green" received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention.