LOVE'S EXECUTIVE ORDER

12.14.2018

Weekly poem on Trump Presidency

DEBORAH LANDAU

The End Of America

So I told the sky it should stay blue
told my daughter she should stay breathing
told my love he should & we would
as the monster storms showed their teeth
and the fires flared and the wines
weren’t plum enough to numb us
and our leaders’ virulent egos seethed--
(people dying off as if it were nothing
to leave this planet as if it were a breeze)
the end of America, no one knew how to manage it
but we tried the typical ways of numbing pain
my daughter painted tiny flowers on her toenails
I mixed honey and vodka, squeezing in a lime
and we carried on with our breathing
my father was still alive, my body kept aging
the pills helped a little, not a lot

—-

Deborah Landau’s fourth book, Soft Targets, is forthcoming from Copper Canyon Press in spring 2019. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Poetry, The Best American Poetry, and The New York Times. The recipient of a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, she lives in Brooklyn and directs the Creative Writing Program at New York University. 

“The End of America” first appeared in American Poetry Review.

—-