ANGEL

by Alejandro Escudé

Jasper Johns: Mind/Mirror at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Sept 29, 2021–Feb 13, 2022. Above: Jasper Johns, Three Flags, 1958. Encaustic on canvas (three panels), 30 7/8 × 45 3/4 in. (78.4 × 116.2 cm) overall. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Gilman Foundation, Inc., The Lauder Foundation, A. Alfred Taubman, Laura-Lee Whittier Woods, Howard Lipman, and Ed Downe in honor of the Museum’s 50th Anniversary 80.32. © 2021 Jasper Johns / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

In the flag painting the flag

goes and is going into the flag

and it takes us with it

the flag that is into the flag 

beyond what we do when

we surf the net, as a nation

we’re a flag entering another flag

and a flag after that one. 

Jasper Johns knows this, 

or does he? You mustn’t ask

him you know. The interpretation

lags behind the artwork always

like a little girl struggling to keep up

with her father who is walking

too fast for her keep up 

but is she really unable to keep up?

The truth is leaving us, and you,

and taking a train to a new epoch

where a train will travel into

another train and another train

after that toward a sunset

that sets within a sunset and 

(you guessed it) another sunset

after that—because it was

Warhol who engineered the first

internet, an ad box for Brillo

that became box after box

after box. So Johns does too

with his flag and other things,

which is what a country is

…things.

Alejandro Escudé published his first full-length collection of poems My Earthbound Eye in September 2013. He holds a master’s degree in creative writing from UC Davis and teaches high school English. Originally from Argentina, Alejandro lives in Los Angeles with his wife and two children.

BANANAS

by Scott C. Kaestner

tired of writing about the t***p administration
so today gonna’ write about… um
hmm… let’s see… that’s it…
bananas!
ya’ heard me, bananas!
the potassium rich phallic fruit
bright yellow and ready for action
affordable and portable, simply delicious
just peel back the outer layer and bite into it
an andy warhol painting, a velvet underground album cover
founder of republics, foreign multinational corporate dominance
impoverishing the working class and abusing their labor… you see
the world is bananas… a place where fruit can be a tool to abuse power
a place that has everything for everyone being denied by a greedy few
instead of feeding the masses bananas are used to entrap the masses
sometimes too green or too rotten or they fall into tiny lil’ spoiled hands
which leads me to our current president… oh wait… fuck… nevermind…

BANANAS!

Scott C. Kaestner is a Los Angeles poet, a dad, Lakers fan, guacamole aficionado, and leftist dreamer. Google 'scott kaestner poetry' to peruse his musings.