poem
Volume 24, Number 4

By We I Mean America

I love cocaine
songs, though I’ve never tried the drug.
Whiskey, with you
I am familiar, love those songs too & the doe
is back at the tree-line clipping buffalo
berries. Blue wood violets
planted in a world-war
ammunition crate. We’re voting on Syria today—should we
send bombs in response to poison gas
used to tag their own, like red-hot iron in the embers
of a cattle-ranch fire?
I love cocaine & war
songs. What the doe eats, we cannot—it’s the same
in reverse. Some berries are poison
to unfamiliar stomachs.
I love the way we wrap our hammers in cloth.


—Jim Davis