After Reading The Patriot Newspaper: July 14, 2015
Deanna Dorangrichia, Ants on Apple, Ithaca, NY
The news headlines are stuffed in exhaust pipes
and King Street is about to explode in Shippensburg, PA.
Tailpipes are clogged
with the “Military’s Transgender Ban”
and the “Number of Uninsured” has hit
the bottom of the Susquehanna.
I am driving on the river bottom
looking for lead musket balls with teeth marks,
something to bite down on while my muffler
burns out and my catalytic converter suffocates.
There are soldiers brushing their hair with bones
down here. My windows are rolled up
while saw blades, British copper half pennies,
and clay marbles float to the surface.
The obituary page is on the shoreline
in a pile of flint and pink arrowheads.
Margaret Mosier Balaban is survived
by thirteen children. She loved to savor
nut roll, raspberry torte, and chocolate
layer cake – her degree in chemistry
was burnt in the oven back in December 1945.
She would have been 91 this year,
but now Mrs. Balaban
is a sheet of paper on the riverbank
where heroin addicts topple over.
This trash pit will never get dug up
and archived because all the historians
are starving to death in toothpick forts.