September 2024
Author's Note: This is one of the very few political poems I’ve attempted. I’ve always been fascinated with poems about the body and its costumes. I think it was the vulnerability of being shoeless that drew me to the topic. And the obvious martyrdom parallel.
Trump’s Shoes
Let me get my shoes.
Donald Trump, July 13, 2024
A draft of summer air shifts with the movements
of those other bodies in the scrum,
as they basket him forward like a burden.
His underarms overleveraged,
the momentum not even his own,
his feet shifting forward
faster than he can instruct them to move.
Shoes, that minutes ago fit so snugly,
are snapped off,
like fingernails caught in a drawer.
His feet, so secure before in their shiny
black shells, seem frailer now.
Strangely infantile.
Without shoes,
each movement feels tentative,
as if from an old affliction.
And the wetness streaking across his cheek,
the kind that feels like renegade snot
when your hands aren’t free to wipe it away,
must be blood.
What if, in the melee, his hair, sprayed to stay put
on the back of his head, is loosening
like an old bandage,
revealing a flash of bare scalp underneath?
What if, right this second,
someone is examining his shoes, inferring
the ordinary size of his feet?
What if they’re checking for lifts?
He never wears lifts!
But then he hears the roar of the crowd.
They’re cheering him on.
They’re shouting. Chanting. Wild with joy.
Fight, Fight, Fight he yells,
pulling away from the pressure of other arms,
pumping his fists in the air.
The crowd’s ecstatic,
because he’s with them again.
Alive and whole.
Why is it better to be wounded, he wonders,
but finally saved
then never to be wounded at all?
Jesus Christ, he mutters, then he understands
―he’s nailed it.
And him, never one for irony,
with no use for a pun.
Moral Danger of Gauloises in the McCarthy Era
That was the summer of the cut-rate rental,
one dispiriting mile from a slow green river
But first, panic when my father confronted
a bureau drawer with something sinister in it,
possibly explosive, I feared, as my mother
and I stood outside, far away from the fallout
of what turned out to be a pale blue wrapper
left by someone so subversive as to smoke
a brand of cigarettes with a name no proper
American should know how to pronounce.
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