USSR
Was the acronym they spoon fed us in third grade
Early afternoons chocolate-milk
Handle-bar cafeteria catered moustaches
Past the mulch burns and calluses of
Autumnal recess
After the Lord’s prayer
when we were required
to look down
Into the open puddle of splayed ink
alphabet inching
across Russian tea
Gray plains of paper not knowing anything about
The cold war or the soviet republic
Or the Berlin wall
Not knowing a thing about the missile
Crisis two decades earlier, how our teachers
Would later describe to us the fashion in
Which they huddled fetus posture beneath the dessert
plateaus of their desks, the shrill of the siren
Heralding an over
head whistling screech of uncertainty
Waiting to find themselves incubating
In an ashy bulb of spontaneous silence
No more, or
The Russian grad student I was in love with
who told me that when she growing up
USA was the enemy and who wouldn’t sleep with me
because she was marrying a different man
Almost thirty years older
who drove a firebird
And who came from a republic of money
How, on Bloomsday that same year
I did more
Shrooms than a Mario brother down at
The Red Foxx den
Walking up The balding cement arch of Main street Hill
at 3am
Convinced with my long hair
And tattered jeans
that I was an
American slacker
Variation of Odysseus
And that the Russian girl
was my Penelope
And how I had to kill the
Dual-Suitors of commerce and capitalism
Before our lips could possibly
Fold into each other’s breath
Licking the back of
Christmas envelopes
loose pocket change
fountain pebble
widening of her
eyes
Like how we used to read
sustained passages of enduring silence,
Uninterrupted, painfully, pledging the pangs of our
allegiance
To the scripted shells of language
Dripping off the cold sheet of a white page
One chilly icicle-shaped
Tear drop at a time.
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