Mark Nowak

from …AGAIN

Mix the ingredients in the air around us. Trump flags, Dixie flags. Sense the exasperation. Still waiting on the Covid vax. Maybe soon we’ll be extinct like Tyrannosaurus Rex. Medical examiners. Taxidermists. XY chromosomes, American exceptionalism, xenophobia. Is this the apex of early November? Exhausted by the exhaust, by the intoxicated national conscience. The United States of America lacks oxygen. All we do is watch the newscasters remix the news. Exhume the bodies. Less moxie. No taxis. The rich pay no taxes. Another death in Texas. This isn’t a hoax. This country needs detox. Extract the prisons. Less Botox. Fewer axes to grind. Less Sirius XM Patriot and less Newsmax. Just play another song on the jukebox, baby. Expect the military jets to continue to fly over the Jets stadium. At least you can relax with football on a flat screen, it’s autumn after all. Expect another anthem to come next. It isn’t in flux. It’s the national complexion that’s in crises. And that’s no exaggeration. Fix it or hex it. Vox populi. That’s the text. 

Yard sales. Yellow urine stains, yellow crime scene barricade tape. Yellow HAZMAT suits. Yesterday feels like years ago. It’s a Yes or No question. No answer. An empty Mickey’s 40oz bottle. Yellow Butterfinger candy wrapper. It’s the dying time of the sunflowers in the fields along the Amtrak tracks by Cemetery of the Maples. It’s the dying time of the yellow jackets in the almost barren fields along US 90 and Stony Kill Creek. The yellowed pages of an old Yellow Pages are history now. So many telephone numbers are dead. You may yearn for the people once attached to them, their numbers stay in your memory, yet you know in your soul where their bones have been buried, their ashes spread, their houses sold to younger homeowners who remodeled years ago. Those years go by in a flash. Yes, it’s more than enough of this yearning. But you can’t quite seem to quit. Yes, the sun’s gone down. Light the candle you bought at Yankee Candle. Drink a Mello Yellow from Dollar General. Butterflies in your stomach. You only live once.

Mark Nowak’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He recently edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021), guest-edited the “Why We Write” issue of Michigan Quarterly Review (Fall 2021), and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is founding director of the Worker Writers School.