Donald Illich: #NotTrump Series
The New Morning
The morning was called something else now.
It was filled with shoveling dirt, shooting conspirators.
The clouds turned salty red, and the light that flashed
over our faces was dooming us all. The cities looked
hazy in the distance, though we could tell it was smoke
coming from their centers, fires that were not willing
to shut down. We whispered the new word for dawn,
the new language for dew, for breakfast, for beginnings.
All these things were willing to be something else,
like our bodies were prepared to contort themselves
in other directions. The only thing that didn't change
was the leftover moon in the sky. It acted jovial over
people hung on platforms, ecstatic over the movement
of bodies into graves. If only we could shoot it, watch it
crash into transports, crowds of people cheering them on.
Donald Illich has published poetry in Rattle, Nimrod, Sixth Finch, The Iowa Review, and other journals. He lives in Maryland.
