From "A Post-Election Sequence"
CHAPTER THREE: EIGHT-WORD LINES
Speeding through the funhouse tunnel, catching glimpses of
myself in the funhouse mirrors, unlike the mirrors
of the proletarian park in Coney Island where my
handsome dad saved up to take me every
fourth of July back when America was famous
for spacious skies, amber waves of grain, liberty
and justice for all, the funhouse mirrors could
expand and contract you, lengthen and fatten you,
distort you but only temporarily, because America was
a free country, we could giggle at ourselves
and walk away, we Jews were especially lucky
living in this free country, a country without
pogroms, we could vote we could defeat tyrants
and bigots we could end persecution and poverty
and I can’t quite remember getting on the
train that brought us to this funhouse where
the dim-lit corrugated latex tunnel like the interior
of a large insect whips us along waving tendrils
waving mirrors twisting our images to images of
the king smiling at us in our baskets
in the rushing Nile loudly wailing and screaming
bodies of infants bobbing in the surrounding water
this chapter does not include the king’s daughter
CHAPTER FOUR: SORRY
"Sorry, the page you're looking for cannot be found," is the message Internet users get when trying to access the Spanish version of the White House page …created in the months following President Barack Obama’s swearing in in 2009. Up until Jan. 20, the site also had a blog dedicated to issues considered of interest for the Hispanic community.
--Fox news
“Sorry the page you are looking for cannot be found”
--my laptop screen
Because there is nothing new under the sun
let's look for precedents: Emperor Shih Huang Ti
built the wall and burned the books
in the third century before Jesus so we have
an idea what to expect: say goodbye to the Spanish
language version of the white house web page
and the associated blogs thereof, goodbye to science
and jurisprudence, hello informers, hello more and more massive
accumulations of wealth, hello gulag, hello to the songs
of resistance, the poems inscribed on toilet paper
and slivers of soap, memory sharpened
like a steak knife, all borders closed,
a time to wait. A time to refrain from waiting.
Alicia Ostriker is a poet and critic, most recently author of Waiting for the Light, twice a finalist for the National Book Award, and currently a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in new York City and teaches in the low-residency Poetry MFA Program of Drew University.