Amit Majmudar
Two POEMS
Chillicothe Apostrophe
Here’s my odi-et-amo Ode to you, O
homely Ohio of the torn-up turnpike,
semis crisscrossing your map like mudflap-
magnificent buffalo, frankfurters sweating
under flecked hotlamps, back-country ice cream
parlor parking lots cacophanously Kanye
where the whiteboys wear wifebeaters
and talk black with platinum- plated buckteeth
(counties once Ku Klux now bling bling),
your Amish-kitchen smoked ham and pancakes,
your former fighter pilots with Parkinson’s
in whose mute dementia Ashland is Inchon,
your trickle-crooked creeks once flush, now fishless
and spanned by rust- rotted struts,
your coal-car carcasses, your house husks
shucked of equity, to the brambles abandoned,
necrotic Cleveland suburb-encrusted
equal parts elegy and punch line,
Youngstown with no young steel-mill-sepulchral,
Painesville painting herself Pabst blue, O you,
fought for, fawned over every four years
when donkeys and elephants (asinine, self-trumpeting)
stampede your stadiums, factories, fairgrounds,
state of the suddenly sad-eyed barflies
and shrunken truckers with saggy tattoos,
of immigrant internists soft-spoken
and cumin-cologned, of table-saw grampaws
with stumps for thumbs, state of the ghost strip
malls and the algae Lake, alas, Ashtabula,
cry woe, Cuyahoga, O nowhere I am native,
maker of Presidents, mother of poets,
O heart shape, O hardship, Ohio, O home.
Corporate Cormorant
My sportscoat stuck to my shrinking shoulders,
I sense the seed coat dissolve the seed.
We call this gravity, but it’s the grave calling
tall dancers and tipsy divines,
all who hold high their haughty heads.
Lock your light feet flush to linoleum tiles
and toil, toil. We’re sorry we’re late,
we wear a watch, we buckle that shackle
and work work work. What stripe of stranger are you,
sir, born minstrel or born administrator?
You’re a listener, you’re a fellow lover:
I know by the way you sway to nothing
but your own hearing out here in the kingdom
of the keen ears. You saw the snares?
Beartrap hubris and the body’s hunger?
Money is roach bait, bite it and retch,
profit the quicklime making finches of men.
Amit Majmudar is the first Poet Laureate of Ohio. His next book is an anthology he has edited and introduced, Resistance, Rebellion, Life: 50 Poems Now, forthcoming from Knopf in May 2017. In February 2018, Knopf will publish Godsong, his verse translation from the Sanskrit of the Bhagavad-Gita.