Dear America
This poem is not about you. It’s about what lies in your wake: hot air, late summer sun, and boats cruising the Potomac. A question of passage. The river is not yours and the grass along the shoreline is not yours, though you staked your claim with boxes of muskets, awls and socks. You who could never take no for an answer, who see yes tagged on every body, every plot of land, everything for the right price. Your price. Once a body could travel as far as its feet would carry it. Once there were no fences, no toll roads, just a long trail flattened between the trees: Anacostians, Nacotchtank, Patawomeck, Piscataway. This river doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to no one, an ocean, but there you go ramming your speedboat against the current, forcing waves up the banks until my kayak lists, unhinging the horizon from the sky.
All Aboard
“I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once the hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.”
—James Baldwin
Take the train from one city to the other, this freedom your birthright, white arms waving from the window. From inside the train you can’t see what you’re passing over, only what you’re passing through. The train picks up speed; the trees and buildings blur, but there’s nothing to worry about: It isn’t your body tied to the tracks. The whisky burns your cheek where you bit through but it’s better than thinking; order another. Learn to take for granted what breaks so you can keep going. Another round of shots. Shotgun means ride up front, coach gun on your lap to kill the hostile Natives. Everyone around you is drunk, waving their white arms. The planet is burning, but if you don’t think about it you don’t have to acknowledge the pain. You hear someone calling after you but don’t look back. Don’t ever look back. There is such thing as invisible damage—invisible because you don’t see it, the air opening like a door to take you through.
Capitalist Conscience
The car waits like a good machine, ready to take you… where? It’s not as if you ever had much sense of direction. Circling like a game piece on a board, pass go, collect $200. You tell yourself it isn’t about money. You tell yourself you’re not here for the money. But what else is there besides money? You cruise for a space in your gas guzzler, spending what you don’t have to keep the economy going, eating empty calories so you always stay hungry. Your body aches from the weight of what you’ve carried across the parking lot all day – a fistful of pennies, a sackfull of discount goods you have no use for, but the bargains were so good you couldn’t pass them up. Living on the margins, seeking credit, consolidating debt, the sea levels rising. The machine waiting, engine running, to drive you to the next catastrophe, the next cliff. To drive you right over.
The Hero’s Journey
The hero is always an accident – listeners look away when I say this, or shake their heads in disbelief. It’s been so long that no one remembers. But I remember. The quiet of the woods, the way the water of every stream ran clear. Where he came from no one knew; we found him roaming around in search of something he called a quest. What he said made no sense, but he seemed so lost, dirt and phlegm covering his face. Of course we helped him – where would he have ended up without us? We tried to understand what he wanted. We showed him the cold spring for drinking, the edge of the forest where the blackberries grew. He ate and drank but it was not enough. Nothing was ever enough. He sharpened a stone to a point and showed us how to hunt, gave us a taste for meat. He spoke to beings in the sky he called gods. The more we tried to help the angrier he became. The rains came and went. The eggs of the small birds opened. We realized that whatever he was looking for he was never going to find it, but by then it was too late. The story was already within us, the emptiness we’d be trying to fill with the same three-part narrative structure for the rest of our lives.
Americana
Who doesn’t love a good bedtime story? The romance of free markets and rugged individualism: if you’re not marketable, you’ll never be free. Go ahead. Vilify every selfless impulse, the honey bees in the garden who work with a single mind, the good of the hive ordering their lives. Each worker can carry half its own weight in pollen. They shiver together through winter, thousands at a time, warming the hive, taking turns, keeping the larvae alive. An instinct for the future. Is it any surprise the species is on the decline, killed off by the pesticides of late stage capitalism? Neonics that stay in the soil for years, dissolve in our water and spread through our streams. Serves them right, the communist bastards. I can hear the free market’s voice, a hiss like napalm seeping into the air.
Holly Karapetkova is Poet Laureate Emerita of Arlington, Virginia, and recipient of a 2022 Academy of American Poets Laureate Fellowship for her work with young poets. Her third book of poems, Dear Empire, won the 2025 William Meredith Prize and the 2024 Barry Spacks Poetry Prize and was recently published by Gunpowder Press.