RED HAT

by Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco


On our way north,
red brake lights
slam like doors.

We see debris
before we see anything
else:

a half-rolled license
plate, glass stars
ground into dirt.

The car is smashed
in on itself—rain
streaks along each

shattered window. A man
bends

down with his hands flat
on his thighs

to see inside,
his shoulders

tight. Someone has put out
flares.

The thing I can’t
believe

is the man’s MAGA
hat, clean like it is new,
holding the rain up

off his face.
I have to read it twice
to get it’s not

a joke, and then
it aches

and I’m ashamed,
the afterimage of the hat

and the wrecked car

drifting with me
all day long
like floating leaves.

Elizabeth McMunn-Tetangco lives in California and co-edits One Sentence Poems. Her chapbooks Various Lies and Lion Hunt are available from Finishing Line Press and forthcoming from Plan B Press, respectively.

ON THE PRACTICE OF DAYLIGHT SAVINGS TIME

by David Feela

The clocks, advanced one hour, will not
save us, not from the imaginations of oblivious children
exhausted in the moist dark while waiting for school buses,
still comatose from that lost hour of sleep.

Not the shadows lengthening into evening
like tails on a tuxedo, all dressed up without
the energy to dance. Like Sisyphus’s rock,
we know pushing the sun back up the hill

won’t keep it there, and the gods won’t change
the sand in our hourglasses, and this life,
as we know it, remains fixed like a nail in the wall
where we pick up the same old hat on the way out.


David Feela writes a monthly column for The Four Corners Free Press and for The Durango Telegraph. A poetry chapbook, Thought Experiments, won the Southwest Poet Series. His first full length poetry book The Home Atlas appeared in 2009. His new book of essays How Delicate These Arches released through Raven's Eye Press, has been chosen as a finalist for the Colorado Book Award.