by CL Bledsoe and Michael Gushue
Reinvent Mozart as a swastika.
Assert the superior caste of privilege-filled eyes,
while never mentioning your stigmatism.
Beige as the new black.
Be goddamned sure about something.
A hammer called reason to subvert any consideration,
Moral assumption as a knife to cut through the gray.
Go back in time and give Mohammed a hickey.
Dress all seed-vessels in the finest birthing habits.
Never look directly at those who rule us,
but use a mirror to avoid being turned
into stop motion playdough. Recite
The Pledge constantly under your breath:
There is a light that never burns out. I carry it
under my tongue. When I stand on tiptoe, it will guide
the unwashed through the wilderness.
CL Bledsoe is the author of seventeen books, most recently the poetry collection Trashcans in Love and the novel The Funny Thing About… . He lives in northern Virginia with his daughter and blogs, with Michael Gushue, at https://medium.com/@howtoeven
Michael Gushue is co-founder of the nanopress Poetry Mutual Press, and he co-curates the reading series Poetry at the Watergate. His work can be found in journals such as Indiana Review, Third Coast, Redivider, Gargoyle, The Germ, and American Letters & Commentary and his books are Pachinko Mouth, Conrad, Gathering Down Women, and—in collaboration with CL Bledsoe—I Never Promised You A Sea Monkey. He lives in the Brookland neighborhood (“a shabby and decidedly unhip neighborhood” —New York Times) of Washington, D.C.
