Same River Twice
by George Yatchisin
Our neighbor the shrink wasn’t
perceived as a safe space
by a client who happened to vote
Trump. Our neighbor assumed
this African-American would feel
threatened by a president who believes
the way to Make America Great Again
is setting the clock back to the 1950s.
I guess this client won’t mind drinking
his separate but equal Kool Aid. Might
as well offer everclear to the alcoholics,
lay the ruddy hemophiliacs down on
beds of nails, lease the land
you don’t own to a fictitious business
with your name, so it makes it
that much easier to go frack yourself.
perceived as a safe space
by a client who happened to vote
Trump. Our neighbor assumed
this African-American would feel
threatened by a president who believes
the way to Make America Great Again
is setting the clock back to the 1950s.
I guess this client won’t mind drinking
his separate but equal Kool Aid. Might
as well offer everclear to the alcoholics,
lay the ruddy hemophiliacs down on
beds of nails, lease the land
you don’t own to a fictitious business
with your name, so it makes it
that much easier to go frack yourself.
George Yatchisin is aghast, appalled, and a poet and writer. He has published the chapbook Feast Days (Flutter Press 2016) and in journals threatened by the end of arts funding. He’s old enough to have worn a Ronald Reagan mask at protests. He’s got an essay about that in I’ll Tell You Mine: Thirty Years of Essays from the Iowa Nonfiction Writing Program (U Chicago Press 2016).
