LOVE'S EXECUTIVE ORDER

05.18.18
Weekly poem on Trump Presidency

NOMI STONE

Two Poems

            Fieldnotes from a Catastrophe

Stars throw their snow
on the water. Quietly, we gather

a document with the numbers,
the tiny echoing laughs, the rows
of cabbage and their lush toughness,

a list of every loved one’s hungers.
I love you. I’m here. Don’t go under.

          Burke Says “Delight” Comes When
          Your Body is Safe From Harm

Planes cook clouds.
War doesn’t take place unless
it happens to your body. 

It does. This time.
On a bright hill above us,
picnickers butter their bread.

Are you happy? If yes, give
the men a flower, hive
them honey from the feed.

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Nomi Stone’s second collection of poems, Kill Class is forthcoming from Tupelo Press in 2019. Poems appear recently or will soon in POETRY, American Poetry Review, Bettering American Poetry, The Best American Poetry, The New Republic, and elsewhere. Kill Class is based on two years of fieldwork she conducted within war trainings in mock Middle Eastern villages erected by the US military across America. 

"Fieldnotes From The Catastrophe" was originally published in The Indiana Review.

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