poem submission for april

Hey Misery,

Please find attached a poem submission for April’s theme of moral panic. I wrote it in the office bathroom — I still have to go into the office to handle paperwork because paperwork will outlive civilization and let’s be honest I can’t argue this exposes me to covid-19 more so than my usual habit of going every other day to the gas station on ‘essential’-deemed trips to restock liquor supplies — pretending I was pooping. There’s a guy who comes into all office facilities now to sanitize everything every half hour or so to maintain required pandemic safety levels, I guess, and while I was doing this I guess he wanted to clean the stall I was in but instead of knocking he just kept yanking on the door, yanking and yanking, door trembling in its frame, and I didn’t say anything, there really is a limited amount of time you can respond in these situations with like an ‘occupied’ or something and if you miss that window both you and the person trying to break into your bathroom stall are doomed to not saying anything about what just happened, and then you leave the bathroom stall and they’re still in the bathroom cleaning the counters, and you avoid eye contact as you wash your hands, 30-seconds, ABCs. Most things seem to go that way, plague or no plague.

Anyway here’s the poem. I’ve also (because I felt like it) attached a photo of the candy bowl our office keeps on the front desk for visitors.

Thank you for your time and consideration,

Nathaniel

vasectomy

the smallest wire
within you gets snipped
the wrong bomb goes off
the city explodes
the cast of a 90s sitcom
engineers a police surveillance state
to canned laughter and applause
picking up a megaphone I urge
my people to become small
smaller than the grit beneath
their own fingernails
small enough to dodge atomic fission
small enough so that I
don’t have to see any of you
anymore