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Hades, Hell’s Bells, the smoke’s getting to me, Hephaestus sending Olympian signals ‘bout all the hubbub happening on earth, worse than Hermes hiding Apollo’s herd of cows, no matter that Hera and Helios and hordes of many-headed beasts thought it was a horrible thing to do and getting all heated up about the theft, and I say that even worse than Hades hitting on Persephone and hauling her off to the Underworld is old Howhard’s grabbing girls by their honey-pots and his acts of deportation and well, you could hear all the howling from Hell to Houston, from Hamburg to Hanoi to Hermopolis in Greece, and damned if that orange windbag, that short-fingered Vulgarian with baby hands, that wallaroo hailing huge crowds and all those alternative facts erupting like Klyuchevskoy in eastern Russia: cough, choke, hawk, hem and—Deîmos kaì Phóbos, yuge horror and fear. Smell rotten orange, hear it, the nasalizing pain of it, the oink, grunt, squeal of that canker-headed scobblelotcher that needs to be hog-tied? It is hard to get a handle on all the hullabaloo, but trust that trumpdignation and limiting the reach of mini-hands might set us free.
Sue Brannan Walker is Professor Emerita from the University of South Alabama. She was Poet Laureate of Alabama from 2003-2012. She is the publisher of Negative Capability Press, the author of The Ecopoetics of James Dickey, ten books of poetry, and has published critical articles on Marge Piercy, Richard Eberhart, Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers, as well as edited numerous anthologies.