Don Zirilli

Donald Zirilli (zirealism.com) is the Poetry Adjudicator for Teen Arts New Jersey. He edited the Red Wheelbarrow (redwheelbarrowpoets.org) and Now Culture (nowculture.com). His poetry (nominated for the Pushcart, Forward Prize and Best of the Net) is in 40+ publications. His chapbook is Heaven’s Not for You (Kelsay Books 2018).

To My Niece Teaching English in Thailand (POEM)

with nothing British you must coffee the words

bounce German phlegm on African drums

with the drawling sprawling dialectation of John Wayne 

pulled over for a broken taillight

now pardner what reason you have for searching my car? 

you got a warrant for that flashlight? 

why ossifer a man’s gotta breathe don’t he?

I’m harmless as a field of corn

I’m a cyan song burning gas stations

lie back in your chair and snore

like you’re trying to wake from tyranny

pick up one of their confiscated iPhones

and order John Brown’s body from Sears & Roebucks 

climb on your desk

tell them it’s a horse appropriated by Comanches

and Banzai the Elvis kata

each lesson exhort them to forget the last 

in the way skyscrapers and novels are built

flouting sky and brain

have them grab an imaginary steering wheel

and drive on prolonged prose pavements

bare the American grain in your teeth

as you grind the gothic and quilt the gears

jerk up your head like a swallowing bird 

and call refugees to arms

I have drunk the sap of the savage maple

y el mole de los conquistadores

I enslaved all the way to my own chains

Earthlings who are mad in any sense I already entered your blood

equal bursting glare purple majesty 

I am become Oppenheimer

one nation under God Indianvisible

our Vishnu who art in postage stamps Amen

pronounce our common sense and from your risen accent

look down upon them like a hungry eagle

as you swoop your proclamations bald 

most of all teach our great beautiful emptiness 

even if it means a classroom of silence