POETRY
A4
♦
By DIANA HAMILTON | 12 September 2016
Untitled | Thomas Simillie | 1890
Sure, I don't love you, he says,
And I won't even look up
from my coffee to remind you of that but
It may just be art, but it hurts,
says a resident of Juárez,
whose city is ruined by the movie
depicting its ruin
The mentally ill are in actual chains
No cops are going to jail
California wants more people to vote and
It's not clear, to Democrats,
whether Obama is embarrassing and
There's a house for sale in South Carolina.
He sighs. He reads the description of the house.
He’s not just reminding me that his attention is well-placed
on world-historic events, he’ll go further.
Maybe there was a death or a divorce or a foreclosure that caused the sale, he considers,
Maybe someone cried too many times in one of the rooms and needed a new room to cry in,
Maybe it's just a rich asshole who wanted a bigger house, or a smaller house, to live "minimally,"
I don't know, he admits.
I'll write a letter to the editor about their dismissal of the protest yesterday, he announces,
I'll write a letter to the editor about the letters to the editor they chose to run, he corrects.
There are three days of unread papers and, he mutters,
better things to care about than love,
I'll write a letter to the editor about a fucking typo, even.
And I won't even look up
from my coffee to remind you of that but
It may just be art, but it hurts,
says a resident of Juárez,
whose city is ruined by the movie
depicting its ruin
The mentally ill are in actual chains
No cops are going to jail
California wants more people to vote and
It's not clear, to Democrats,
whether Obama is embarrassing and
There's a house for sale in South Carolina.
He sighs. He reads the description of the house.
He’s not just reminding me that his attention is well-placed
on world-historic events, he’ll go further.
Maybe there was a death or a divorce or a foreclosure that caused the sale, he considers,
Maybe someone cried too many times in one of the rooms and needed a new room to cry in,
Maybe it's just a rich asshole who wanted a bigger house, or a smaller house, to live "minimally,"
I don't know, he admits.
I'll write a letter to the editor about their dismissal of the protest yesterday, he announces,
I'll write a letter to the editor about the letters to the editor they chose to run, he corrects.
There are three days of unread papers and, he mutters,
better things to care about than love,
I'll write a letter to the editor about a fucking typo, even.
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Diana Hamilton's first book, Okay, Okay (Truck Books 2012) dealt primarily with women crying at work. Three chapbooks came out in 2015: 1. Universe (Ugly Duckling Presse), 2. 23 Women to Kiss Before You Die (Make Now Press), and 3. Break-Up (Troll Thread).
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