After John Steinbeck inaugurates the Trump-
Kennedy Center, Edwin Hubble gets his horoscope
done, setting off a flash flood of intellectual foment.
Simone de Beauvoir tunes in to Andrew Tate,
Lord Haw-Haw blows Winston Churchill’s mind,
Stanley Kubrick remakes Birth of a Nation,
and Aaron Copeland replaces “Fanfare for the Common Man”
with “Who Let the Dogs Out?”
Rachel Carson invests in coal. Jonas Salk delves into iridology.
Charles Darwin searches for lizard people in the Galapagos.
Carl Friedrich Gauss abandons mathematics for numerology.
Coco Chanel wears Garanimals. Epicurus praises Jell-O.
Isaac Newton is never without his lucky rabbit’s foot
and Albert Einstein always forwards chain letters.
Fyodor Dostoevsky watches Jerry Springer
and Virginia Woolf never misses Real Housewives.
You can find Da Vinci painting Elvis on velvet at any gas station.
Hundreds of Jon Wesick’s poems and stories have appeared in journals such as the I-70 Review, New Verse News, Paterson Literary Review, and Unlikely Stories. He is a regional editor of the San Diego Poetry Annual and host of the Gelato East Fiction Open Mic as well as the NAV Arts poetry reading. His latest short story collection is Saint John the Blasphemer. He lives in Manchester, New Hampshire and longs for gene editing to bring giant wombats back from extinction.
