poem
Volume 27, Number 4

Nobody Dies

In a famine somewhere, in a country I can’t remember, the boys hunt plump
tarantulas, stir fried, crackling, sizzling on the Food Channel—the canny fasting
filmed, charmed out of the snake pit of a multitude of channels. Vast
ivories in my continent of darkness narrowcast. The dish cyclopsing.
There’s Kim Kardashian—a Warhol advertisement.… Reality the down-low up
in scandal, CNN, QVC, the Disney Channel. Chatter on demand, packaged
in subscription, dished and satellited. A cobra’s dance of bandwidth mapped.
The damage as collateral, mummified in ash, pulling through the shatter of a
dashboard. Soldiers scorched on cell phones, skyped on mobile, twittered as
the Ivory Coast explodes. Huddled masses … the holocausts redacted.


—Kathleen Hellen