Bill Cushing

CHALLENGING BUMPER STICKERS

 

Question authority white letters proclaim,

a battle cry set on a black backdrop,

but should we not do the same?

Let’s respond to bumper stickers, challenge

phrases plastered on car rear ends,

simplistic slogans that ought

to stop pretending to be thought,

these rigid deflections

posing as reflections.

 

Meat is murder, but plants breed,

grow, move, feel pain, bleed, are even aerobic,

so aren’t vegans kingdomistic, vegephobic?

Still, that response takes too long. To do it right,

retorts should be short and slight.

 

Eden was vegan declares another.

We saw how that turned out.

Support our troops, declares an Army mother.

As a taxpayer, do I do anything other?

I may be slow, but I’m ahead of you.

Where is a battering ram when one’s due?

 

In case of Rapture, car will be unoccupied:

Rather smug, almost snide.

Doesn’t God get to decide?

War is not the answer.” Doesn’t that depend

on the question?

Every mother is a working mother one says,

but let’s recall Gabriel Fernandez.

 Coexist plastered next to the command Resist:

No question needed at the irony in this.

GETTING OLD IS

 

Getting old: it is indeed “the passing of an era.”

After all, the last munchkin has died, and

while I sit, stuck in neutral at a traffic

light, an emaciated Santa stands at the curb where

Concourse crosses Olympic, eyeing

the entrance to the free soup kitchen in the church

across the street as he plays his own version of Frogger,

avoiding a pickup piled high with aging washing machines

and weathered desks trapped behind wooden slats

while two modern hausfraus traverse the crosswalk,

each gliding in Stepford chic to the beat

of the traffic light’s pulse. I wonder of the drifter:

Does he take the exact same route daily, a commuter

of his own sort? Inhaling the smoke of the cigarette

he bummed earlier, his face wrapped in

a walrus moustache, all his belongings hang, bagged

at his side—almost a part of him, clutched by shaking hands

mottled and tobacco brown, this traveler—this vagrant

wreckage, this canary in our coal mine—signifying the times

we find ourselves dying in.

 

WITNESSING THE FOURTH IN 20/20 AT A DRIVE-IN MOVIE

 

Sitting in a steel box that rolled onto a field

joined by other people, they also isolated.

 

I contemplate the potential to regain

the freedom we did freely yield.

 

Beyond the wooden skirt draped

before waves of mounded dirt that

 

wash ashore before a large screen

of flickering images,

 

we watch as bright strings of confetti

spray across the sky, coming

 

from illegal fireworks. They burst

and surround a honeyed lunar orb

 

trapped between power lines and balanced

above peaks of low-pitched parapets.