A Take on My Modern America
Tatiana Shpkow
Hell – Squirrel Nut Zippers
The five used to pay for your cigarettes was passed
between boys at a rest stop, flushed down someone’s toilet, a store
owner’s first and last bill before he closed down. Now it's going off the side
of a highway at 120 miles per hour in a Toyota RAV4 with a Cocaine
Jesus and a dashboard Devil, and you’re waiting for
your next high in a rest stop bathroom outside of Arizona.
Beauty, talent, fame, money, refinement top skill and brain
But all the things you try to hide will be revealed on the other side
My own personal Hell doesn’t feature the fire the minister
talked about at our Father’s funeral. It looks something like divorce papers
held up on the fridge with colorful letter magnets, the kindergarten trash
filled with heroin needles. Yours looks something like a hit that
doesn’t land, the news articles of your local drug dealer going off
the road with a brick of cocaine. Standing in line at Walmart, paging
through the tabloids, every single headline reads:
Beauty, talent, fame, money, refinement top skill and brain
But all the things you try to hide will be revealed on the other side
There was no gospel you could understand, hissing at
yourself in the mirror, tweaking as you paced the rest stop urinal. I saw
that you were shot there, that a tired-drunk truck driver opened
the door and unloaded a round from his shotgun into
your chest. In the interrogation later, he described the Devil, face
filled with red welted holes, teeth as sharp as serrated blades.
Beauty, talent, fame, money, refinement top skill and brain
But all the things you try to hide will be revealed on the other side
It’s Only Sex – Car Seat Headrest
A pregnancy test at CVS costs $10.79, the bag of chips she’s been craving is on sale, 2 for $1, and you need eight quarters to call her to ask her if she needs anything else, or if this was it. I reply, of course, a yeah, asshole, for you to have used a condom. You get into your father’s 2005 Nissan Sentra and you drive to your father’s house, stop outside of the soon-familiar preschool playground, put your head in your hands, thinking ‘how did I become the newest contender as a lowlife father figure on 16 and Pregnant?’
Beck, or Brent, or something, my friends told me. Everyone knew it back when you had been laminated on pages in our yearbooks. There were sketches of guns in the margins next to your name, last time we opened the page. Wesson. You’d always make that joke. School shooter to be, I teased you, before the back pain, the slap of a clapperboard, the cameras. It was almost as if you were meant for American consumption––on the honor roll since you were thirteen, what should’ve been a 1600 on the SAT. But, being the best at ducking out of gym assemblies develops a nicotine dependence. Knowing where your father hides his Penthouse conceives mistakes.
Our only child was named Natalie. I didn’t know until after I found your cigarette boxes that you named her after the Nat Shermans you hid in your drawers. Rolling papers were unfolded into yellow packets, meth dumped out and signed with needles on the dotted line. I stuck a cigarette in the side of my mouth and clicked onto the news. Yet another death, another war, another school shooting. Reality TV Star Shot in Urinal Bathroom. I ignored calls from the daycare and continued watching,
Not out of desire or shame
But some subconscious impulse to feel pain
Permanent High School – The Voidz
The first time I was high, I was on my cousin’s
yellow-stained waterbed in my living room. 16 and
Pregnant, the season the couple who went to our school
was on, played on our small screen. Their daughter, Natalie
Wesson, sat next to me, hand stuck in my belt, cursing
under her breath as my eyes stayed glued to the screen,
watching dead people talk about baby showers. She had
been Prom queen a few years ago, a thin blonde who had
lost shape in her middle shortly after she put the crown on
her shelf. Her brother died in a cow-tipping accident, her
father via sawed-off shotgun.
No one from the sheriff’s department called Lisa Wesson.
No officer appeared on the doorstep to inform her that her
daughter had been killed. It was a friend calling, before she
picked up the newspaper. She flipped past the
HEARTBREAK headline, manicured fingers pausing over
a black and white photo. “Motionless,” the caption read, the
image of a blonde girl on the concrete, blood pooling
around her. The victim was unidentified. Lisa didn’t have
to turn to page 17 to see the complete victim’s list of her
Alma Mater’s mass shooting. Her daughter was dead,
picture plastered, motionless, on page 4.
If I look closely, I can still see the bloody full stops on our
cafeteria walls, portraits of ghosts in empty seats
in Calculus, English IV, Physics. I see one in my living room
as I smoke weed for the first time. The couple on TV is
keeping the baby. Their child has a decomposing hand in
my jeans, whispering sweet nothings with what’s left of her
tongue. I thought I wanted a chance with her, but
When did my dreams tear at the seams?
Put me on a different team
Dropkick Me, Jesus – Bobby Bare
There’s something about a Confederate flag hanging, tobacco-in-cheek,
God Fearing man that makes our country what it is. They’re made in lottery tickets
bought at liquor stores, in roadside memorials, in sober fathers and
drunk fathers and belt-wearing fathers. In pickup trucks and pitbulls and trailer
parks, in war stories and dead cousins and country songs about beer. In the words
‘Republican’ and ‘Slavery.’ In the shotgun he killed someone with.
And over end neither left nor the right
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights
As he looks at his high school championship ring, he would tell you about
his friday night lights, about his truck littered with bullet holes, maybe even
mention his father who died in Vietnam, or the concrete blocks that held
his bed up as a kid. See him get on two knees, gut a fish, fix his truck, pray. Even
at church, he’s never asked about his doubting. People think
his cowboy hat is a receptacle for faith, that any hardship he’s dealt with
will be spat out like Grizzly. And don’t you ever feel bad when he tells you that
God is good? We both know that’s all he really knows how to say.
And over end neither left nor the right
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights
In my modern America, these men exist on rainy highways, in bars, in bowling alleys.
Not stopped at a gas station in the middle of the night, eyes rolling into
the back of their heads like they’re coming down from a high. He’s heading to the
bathroom at a rest stop, gun on his shoulder, sweating and paling in his comedown. The God
Fearing man, God himself, opens the stall and comes face to face with something he’d
been told was against everything he lived for, raised his shotgun and pulled the trigger,
And over end neither left nor the right
Straight through the heart of them righteous uprights