by Annette Hakiel
My sinuses contain monarchs in chrysalis
wrapped in radical poster art,
and dangling at the back of my throat,
and the hallucinatory parasitosis is crawling
up the backs of the legs of my invisible
old world stockings.
Love, Antifa will be hiding in my Polish-American knuckles,
since I know whatever life throws at us
it throws up inside of us
like an orange cloud of particulate poster pigment into the gray Warsaw skyline.
Because the air, everywhere, is turning orange.
Warsaw skylines are popping up in Indiana, in Virginia, in Honolulu, in Cincinnati.
You will know these Warsaw skylines by the faint scent of char clinging above
the people’s heads hung down
and the fists punched up into the air.
We scratch our poems onto walls, sew them into jackets
and rags, plastic-laced
& ready to be burned for municipal energy.
Listen, even by the administration’s own estimates
landmines have been found
all up and down Liberty’s lost psyche,
while a symbol of two triangles held within a circle
like a beak feeding another beak gets spray painted in the subways.
Love, let my momentum boomerang you back faster than any retro fad.
Let me be me by this riverside, you by yours,
on this corner of this near, absolute and torrential, Hegelian night
filled only with the chemically choked muffled cries
of the poor insects and birds,
with the loose, secret third thing,
wildflowers growing madly under distant powerlines
along the rights-of-way,
the blossoms turning themselves to face—like tiny children at play—our only sun.
Annette Hakiel has three chapbooks out with dancing girl press, the third entitled Glitch Anthropocene, and one self published book, Wharf Trash: Love Poems for the Ocean Cleanup. She has schizophrenia and lives in Brooklyn with her husband, and cat, Allen.