by Alice Twombly
I
The Evening News: July 4, 2018
A stag, with a full rack of antlers,
stands stationary on my front lawn at dusk.
I run outside with my only weapon—
a mop still damp from washing the floor,
point it at him, shouting: Nothing.
I charge him, waving the wet rags back and forth, like a flag.
He moves a few feet away and stares at me.
I advance further, but each pause generates only
small indifferent changes. Finally, I run towards him screaming with all the energy
I possess. He bounds at last into the next yard,
turns for a final look, and disappears into the dark.
The next morning, I see what he had done before I’d noticed him—
petals strewn everywhere, and every plant I’ve nurtured
all summer, decapitated at the bud, eaten, and destroyed.
II
The Midday News: July 16, 2018
He sells the farm, the antiques and the wall hangings,
chases away the loyal dogs,
poisons the wells, floods the crops with leaded water,
jacks the flagpole, torches the flag
and takes down those old Post Magazine covers of the Four Freedoms
that had hung on the wall since World War 11.
Driving the landowners off their historic land
he buys it on the cheap,
and using the unskilled, dazzled, and defrauded labor that remains
begins erecting the first stages of the Putin Trump Tower
on the burnt fields of that defruited and polluted plain.
Alice Twombly is a teacher, photographer, poet, and political junky. A New Jersey resident, she curates a monthly poetry reading in Teaneck, NJ: “Thursdays Are For Poetry at Classic Quiche.” She teaches adults at The Learning Collaborative in New City, NY and lectures at local libraries. A member of “Brevitas,” an online poetry collective in NYC. Her work has been published in The New Jersey Poetry Monthly, First Literary Review-East, The Red Wheelbarrow, and Brevitas.