Introducing
Ethan Kwak

 

The News

 

Did you hear about the graffiti

by the high school gym?

The mayor just addressed it

and the government came

in hazmat suits with yellow tape

and the top psychologists

are currently analyzing

it and the poets are

calling it art and

the gossipers say

the end is near.

Someone came and

wrote the bane

of smalltown society

on a wall.

Someone wrote

I’M FUCKED

and the police are

looking to lock up

another crazy one

because most of

the crazy ones

are already locked up.

And by the way

did you hear

about the major spillage

last tuesday

in the school cafeteria?

Two cups of OJ stained the floor.

A disaster.

 

 

 

 

 

Once

 

I was born in a gray building that was once a sidewalk in a previous life,

in cotton garments that were once seeds in the wind,

before I grew to write poems that were once five dollar bills

and met people that were once strangers.

 

I like to think that I was something useful, or at least sentimental

like a scratched up record

that plays in the background when two lovers first meet.

I’ll see that movie in theaters,

turn to a stranger, tell them that I used to be a song.

 

In another life, I was a scholar of anthropology.

I like to think I was close to the truth before I died

and was reborn in this body, the one that speaks to you now.

The truth of what humanity once was, to what we all were.

 

We could’ve once been wobbling cubes of jello

saliva on a baby’s bib,

fire extinguishers, pails of rainwater.

We could’ve been strands of cut hair

on the floor of a barbershop,

We could’ve been peach pits

and pomegranate seeds

We could’ve been lions,

we could’ve been raw power coursing through utility poles,

seaweed stuck between teeth,

the stutter of the answering machine.

 

Now we are the sound of something shattering, over and over again,

Just another generation born in an echo.

 

Rate this poetry.

Copyright is reserved by the author. Please do not reproduce any part of this article without consent.