By: Marc Schorin
Resistance
The billy club is my enemy, I say, and the hunger it beats out
is almost nearly my own. I am in agony, it is true.
The billy club snaps what binds muscle to skin to consciousness.
Agony makes my eyes drool.
I want your panegyrics
in Native tongues.
I want to measure good and evil like a meaty heart and a feather.
I want,
ceaselessly.
A complex God rots in my head. He tells me about Malcolm X
and I think on him like how a butcher thinks of leather.
The Rise of Fascism
Politics plus theater is a cocktail I used to knock back — one and then another,
a chain of magnets, my drunkenness ringing out like a magnetic field.
They used to serve those cocktails at The Rise of Fascism, a bar at the city’s political margins.
Now they only serve lagers, and everything is just as it appears.
I am often terribly sincere.
Today, I received prophecies to stuff into my back pocket like a paycheck.
Tomorrow I will receive even more omens, for which I am a glutton.
At The Rise of Fascism, I stop suckling my beer.
I run out to the rain.
I am sick to my stomach, far too full of other people.
The water slashes me apart.
There they go, the many people stuffed under my skin.
They slip through my water-gashes,
they slip into the gutters
like rats.
Marc Schorin is a recent graduate of Princeton University’s Departments of French and Creative Writing. They have won the Edmund Keeley Award for Translation and an undergraduate prize for excellence in creative writing. Their work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Adirondack Review, Wrongdoing Magazine, and Box Journal.