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Austerity
Go off the fiscal cliff with me, baby. I’m ready.
We can hold hands while we blow through
West Virginia quickly, since we’re halfway down
77 past Charleston already and I’m cranked on
Cherry Coke from Burger King, feet on the dash,
wondering aloud if they’ll cart sad Dick Clark out
again for TV New Year’s Eve while the car radio
plays Blue Öyster Cult (I’m burnin’ for you), then
world news: Putin says no Russian adoptions
to the US and you say Dick Clark’s a year gone
(heart attack) and the radio says a victim of
gang rape died in India, and that frenzied buyers,
fearful of a ban, are swarming gun stores after
Newtown to stock up on rounds of .223 bullets.
Home in the darkness. Home on the highway. Assault rifles
are sold out across the country. Across the country
we pass trailer parks along the river, empty parking lots
of long-shuttered store fronts, trees hobbled with ice,
and signs left over from Christmas: Happy Birthday
Jesus, and Mary Wrapped the Greatest Gift of All.
Congressional leaders are hopeful about a deal, but
I am not confident that anything will change this stretch
of desolate road, this altitudinous mountain we climb
in our four-wheeldrive vehicle. Most days it seems
we all might steer directly, without detours, into the white
and constant border. If you ask me if I’m anticipative,
I might say yes. West Virginia, you were Wild and
Wonderful, then Open for Business, but now you’re
Wild and Wonderful again because everything comes back,
even Dick Clark, with impaired speech, Beech-Nut gum
sponsorship long gone, to wish us a Happy New Year,
though now it’s followed by “Seacrest—out!”
With his perfect teeth and hair, Ryan ushers in
the year of austerity, the year when there was only
evening and morning, the bare trees,
their dark bodies, their bent limbs.
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Erika Meitner is the author of five books of poems, including Ideal Cities (Harper Perennial, 2010)—a 2009 National Poetry Series winner; Copia (BOA Editions, 2014); and Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018), winner of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in poetry. Her poems have been published most recently in Virginia Quarterly Review, Orion, The Believer, The Southern Review, Poetry, and elsewhere. Meitner is currently a professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her sixth book, Useful Junk, is forthcoming from BOA Editions in April 2022. (For more on Erika Meitner, click here.) ["Austerity" is from Holy Moly Carry Me (BOA Editions, 2018).]
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