by: Mark Wallace
Mark Wallace’s excerpts from “The End of America, Book 8” challenge the reader to consider the ways in which our various American worlds overlap and intersect. Nature, the suburbs, exploited workers, our current political dysfunction: Wallace quietly but forcefully sees how it’s all connected and doesn’t let us off the hook if we don’t. Ultimately, he wants us all to have “[a] chance to live/ that doesn’t already/ feel like description.”
Another 21st century
citizen trying not
to die in place
dreaming of some
other hand to touch
in replacement for familiar
productive time
grabbing behind the tract
a chance to live
that doesn’t already
feel like description
of every move
as a function of a fine
tuned instrument made
of these streets
“I could get on the freeway, go
straight out into
my current life mirrored
as long as I don’t
have to keep
living this one”
Legs clinging
tightly to the gravel
I walk down
the hillside
the path below
the ridge lined
with houses
some with carport,
pool, high fence,
myself, breathing
comparing me
to dead again again
I don’t stop, today
in a picture
I don’t yet become
**********
Taking pictures by the one hundred
foot brontosaurus at Cabazon
windmills
churning in the dusty
pass on the valley’s
edge the human-created
motion highlighting
the concrete
unfreedom everyday
“nothing’s stopping you
from living homeless”
“if you wish”
Reminding others
the options——-the limits
He tries to turn
education into a wild
cat day trader speculation
bubble
vibrating to the whim
of corporate raiding barracudas
Guys in Martinsville Ohio
working night
shifts installing freezer
lights for a grocery store
national chain using
part-time
workers with no
benefits or security
exploding numbers
and a food stamp
beneficiary growth curve
hidden suburban
poor
“I always thought
people on public
assistance were lazy, put
piles of steaks
in their shopping carts,
but it helps
feed my kids”
Clinging
to an ideology until
it abandons
the way it was meant to,
you become abandoned,
rejecting yourself
Still, a weekend
out of town clears
the brain
prepared to be right
back at it
Mark Wallace is the author and editor of more than fifteen books and chapbooks of poetry, fiction, and essays. Most recently he has published a book-length prose poem, Notes from the Center on Public Policy, and a novel, The Quarry and The Lot. He lives in San Diego, California.
