Parking lot hijacked, now a miniplex,
how else will we watch the latest neo-liberal propaganda in 12 empty theaters at once?
Forest gone, now a landfill. Local restaurant burned, now a boutique,
unaffordable clothing in the company of plants—
Mind lost, now a sentient twitter bot, do not chase, will run,
in America, a poem is a wasted tweet, post, caption, reel.
Food truck park given the boot, now a skyscraper,
remote tech employees need offices.
Condemned fentanyl house demolished, now an old folks home,
they should have combined the two,
addicts need parents, abandoned parents need children.
Historic wooden church burned down, now an empty lot,
new tall half-full apartment building, inevitable.
The bowling alley became a Target, then became a bowling alley again.
And me?
Grab me by my thin hair and put me in
your long soft neck lips-first if you want.
I will call that home. It has been years since
Idaho pushed me out. Adaptation
became the word-of-the-day. Swim or sink.
We’re moving overseas. It’ll be great. From
here to eternity, you’ll be cultured.
Say goodbye to your dogs, skateboards, friends, games
and whatever future awaited you.
In Japan you’ll hear your mother having
sex with a man who is not your father
through the walls. She’ll catch you watching porn for
the first time, emphasize how fake it is.
You’ll live through Fukushima and only
remember hiding under her desk while
the whole home of the world shook. You’re not safe
anywhere. Good luck unlearning that one.
In Germany your peers will harass you,
call you fag, take their shirts off, and fight you,
but you’ll get to eat schnitzel and drink beer!
You’ll be isolated in a basement,
no friends in town, a sad-faced sixteen-year
-old-regular at a Turkish hookah bar, drunk
and smoked out dry like barbecue ribs,
unable to save your sisters and mom
from the abusive man-child DJ who’s
the first person to encourage you to
be funny, whose drugs you steal for yourself:
Weekends, you put yourself through ego deaths—
fistfuls of psilocybin, your own face
staring back at you when you close your eyes—
How many times can you kill it before
it stops coming back whole?
Why does your best friend keep attempting suicide but
never succeed? She was your first kiss, then
stopped talking to you, comes over to get
high—And we won’t mention when Joey ran
away, or what Taylor was like when she was
alive—four or five different deaths since then,
only ten years later—all the mormons,
or all the fathers beating and raping
their daughters, sons too, no consequences.
The wrists and thighs cut, meals skipped, truancy:
kung fu movies, watercolor homework,
and hip hop music to vent the anger.
The drunk boys who tried to kiss you before
attacking you, crying and passing out
on the cluttered floor of a winter shed.
No one off-base speaks your language, but no-
one on-base does either. That’s the hard part.
Your nose starts bleeding every Wednesday at
2:30pm: It’s the accutane
taken without food and with a fountain
drink sixty percent gin: napping through lunch.
It’s hard to eat without smoking weed—Holding
boosts your popularity, gets you on
a list, your friends stripsearched between classes,
accused of dealing, and shoplifting from
the exchange, but no one’s got any proof
and you’re drunk by 11am so
none of it matters, you’re more or less deaf
somehow the class president and prom prince.
You still have the keloid bump on your chest
and the palm scar from the glass bottle thrust.
You bandaged it yourself, no stitches but
it was deep and needed stitches. You cried.
The boy who succeeds socially on these
military bases, what does he look like?
I wouldn’t know. No one comes out on top.
Faces replaced every year on the dot.
Hello friend. Goodbye friend. Sorry your Dad
died.