09.14.2018
Weekly poem on Trump Presidency
TRACI BRIMHALL
Bedtime Story With Goodnight Moon And CNN
Here, the now turns the cardboard pages to telephones
and red balloons. Goodnight moon. Goodnight room.
There in the then, a scarecrow stuffed with a missing
woman’s hair. There in the web, a wolf spider
with a September hunger and blind in half her eyes.
Back, back in your newest hour, a woman vanished
and no one looked for her. Dark, dark my stalk and tassel.
Darker still my shadow’s voice reciting newborn gospels,
ardent as the sing and saw of wind. Goodnight nobody.
Goodnight mush. Rock, rock in a stippled field. Rock and hush
as the rest of the woman is found abandoned in Indiana.
As others are discovered in positions of sleep or rapture
in buildings tagged for demolition. Who knows how many
we could find, the officer says as teams sweep the empty blocks.
He targeted women no one would miss. Before confessions,
my relief. I would miss your nose, your ears, your sour
breath, therefore you are safe. Therefore, emergency
numbers secure on the fridge, the reassurance of curtains.
Goodnight air. Goodnight noises everywhere. Soft, soft
the windfall apples. Softer still the curled fists gripping
the yes of the world, accepting the television’s cadence
of tragedy and sleepless months revised into happiness, the yes
of flies corseting a body, the yes of night shepherding shadows
closer to home. Yes, the moon. Its bright unending, Yes.
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Traci Brimhall is the author of Saudade (Copper Canyon, 2017), Our Lady of the Ruins (W.W. Norton, 2012), and Rookery (Southern Illinois University Press, 2010). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, Poetry, The Believer, The New Republic, and Best American Poetry.She’s received fellowships from the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing and the National Endowment for the Arts. She’s an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Kansas State University. “Bedtime Story With Goodnight Moon And CNN” originally appeared in Still Life With Poem.
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llustration: anna_croc01