from …AGAIN
Jack pines. Junk food. 1-800-GOT-JUNK. It’s just another episode of Hoarders. It’s just another empty parking lot outside another shuttered JCPenney. J. Crew relocated to the outlet mall outside of Lee. Need a job application? Either you’re in jeopardy or you’re on your couch watching Jeopardy. Eating Jolly Ranchers. Eating Junior Mints. Junk bonds, junkies, bondage. American jobs. So just keep a journal. Do a Jigsaw puzzle. The Jack O’Lanterns are beginning to rot on the porches in the suburbs. Maybe look for Jupiter in the night sky. Watch reruns of The Jetsons on YouTube. Jetstreams. Jewelry boxes full of stars. Northern nights. Or maybe we’re just in a new kind of jail. Spiral Jetty. Injustice and joblessness. Circle Jerks. It’s in the daily newspapers behind the paywall. Frozen Junior’s cheesecake from Price Chopper. Or drive to Jack ’n the Box and come home if you have one to watch the killjoys on a giant flatscreen. Juxtapositions, juvenilia, juntas. Trump, at the podium, jitters and jives. Jehovah and Jekyll in one. Long live Jackie O. White jellybeans. The New Jim Crow. It’s beginning to sound a lot like jackhammers. Every day is Judgement day. No justice, just the police. Just junkyards. Just the braying of the jackals.
**
Halcyon days, like the Keynesian days, are history now. In America, there is no again. Maybe it’s karma for how the country started. Knights of Columbus. KKK. Fake kink. Kmart collapsed, but the KISS Army survives. So maybe a quick trip to Kwik Trip for a Twix, or KFC for a KFC bucket because why not, the kingdom may be crumbling but the drive thru is still open late. Or swing the kettlebells. Make a kale Caesar. Kill or keep track of your kilocalories. Drop another kilo. Out in the country where the kindling is kept. And kegs of kerosene. Sing karaoke (maybe something by the Kinks or Killing Joke). Kneel with a knife over a deer carcass. Knick knack paddy whack. Pass the ketchup packets, the Chick fil’A Zesty Buffalo sauce. Kumquats. It’s just a joke. We’re not really joking anymore. Knowledge is kryptonite. The men in their beloved khakis, white knights kvetching about “urban crime.” Kidnap the curriculum. Run it through the kangaroo courts. Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Amy Conan Doyle. Sing Kumbaya. It’s all off-kilter. It’s more than a kerfuffle. Killing time sometimes. The rest of the time it’s kaput.
**
Lithium. Lingerie. Abandoned NAPA auto parts store near Lebanon Valley Speedway. Old RVs settled in for the upcoming winter. A few leftover fires. Limp tires, retreads. Get Little Caesars delivered. Landscaping businesses. Northern lights. Like it or not. At one point in history we were called the lumpenproletariat (from the German lumpen, “rag, rogue”). Just labor now. Belabored. Refugee workers, migrant child laborers. Crumbling factories that lack investment capital. Lack love. An era that’s lost its luster. Laughing gas, generic laundry detergent at the local laundromat. Like Gain, again. Laughingstocks. A life sentence? Every sentence feels like a lifetime ago. Lapsed payments. Lease expired. Lifetime Channel movies to help you forget. The lightbulbs are lukewarm at best. Life cycles on life support. A line of nine harvest green John Deere tractors most likely won’t be sold until next spring. Lines through the parking lot at Long John Silvers. When I left this morning for a Target pick-up my daughter’s window shade was drawn, but when I return a few hours later her window is open to the light. If only history could be a little more like this. Haybales lightly dusted in snow. Dusky late fall sky. Foliage on the forest floor. A pair of northern cardinals singing the old lullabies.
**
Munchkins from the Dunkin’ drive-thru at the edge of Pontoosuc Lake. A sord of mallards muck about on the soon-to-be frozen water. My Family Assault Weapons sticker on the back window of the SUV in front of me. A Blue Lives Matter sticker, too. Largemouth Bass, Smallmouth Bass, Tiger Muskellunge. Ice fishing shacks and snowmobiles coming soon. America is American after all. Morning sickness, murder mysteries, melancholia. It’s programmed into the algorithms. Come to Dunkin’, Big Mac Meal Deal. The madding crowd seems madder than before. In the parking lot at Walmart, mercenaries wearing MAGA caps. Buying MAGA flags on Amazon.com. So much moxie. So sophomoric. It’s late autumn. In the night sky, there’s a waxing moon or a waning moon. Moonshine. Maybe or maybe not. It’s like a mortuary here sometimes. Sometimes it’s like a morgue. Dead deer on the side of the highway. Misty late afternoons, or is that fog again. The mountains, the coyotes in the mountains, the mice in the stomachs of the coyotes in the mountains. There’s maybe a momentum here of some kind. At least we’ve got Munchkins and maybe we’ll get a McFlurry, too. Best of times, worst of times. Pots of dying mums.
**
MARK NOWAK’s books include Shut Up Shut Down, Coal Mountain Elementary, Social Poetics, and …AGAIN (forthcoming), all from Coffee House Press. He recently edited Coronavirus Haiku (Kenning Editions, 2021) and wrote an introduction to Celes Tisdale’s When the Smoke Cleared: Attica Prison Poems and Journal (Duke University Press, 2022). A native of Buffalo, Nowak is founding director of the Worker Writers School.
