Friday, July 28, 2017

BREAKING

by Melissa Balmain



Giphy.com


Watching our children at the beach,
we ought to smile and schmooze,
but—phones regrettably in reach—
we're swamped by waves of news:

A crook goes free. A mouthpiece quits.
More leaders mix with commies.
Each hour or so, the Prez emits
A couple tweet tsunamis.

Battered and weary on the shore,
we fight for breath and wonder
how many more can hit before
they finally drag us under.


Melissa Balmain is Editor of Light, a journal of comic verse. Her poems have appeared in such places as American Life in Poetry, Lighten Up Online, Poetry Daily and The Washington Post's Style Invitational; her prose in The New Yorker, The New York Times, McSweeney’s, and Success. Her poetry collection Walking In on People (winner of the Able Muse Book Award), is often assumed by online shoppers to be some kind of porn.