decomposing on the sidewalk.
You step around it for weeks
and then one day it’s gone,
dealt with by shovel
and black trash bag.
It’s buying two plates Saturday
at the church dinner to raise funds
for the kid’s cancer, bless his heart,
then voting Tuesday to cut his Medicaid.
It’s the graveyard shift
at the suicide hotline, the caller
who lost her meth money at the slots.
It’s risking it all, again.
It’s sending the class home
with instant mac and math packets
before you go on strike,
and it’s halted construction
on the Capitol grounds, the fists
of contractors raised in solidarity.
Over chants that rise like
Guthrie tunes or Baptist hymns,
it’s the governor calling you spoiled.
Oklahoma, said the man
who sold me a used refrigerator,
is the opposite of New York:
if you can’t make it here,
you can’t make it anywhere.
Fucking fridge barely lasted a year.
