Dan Albergotti is the author of The Boatloads (BOA Editions, 2008) and Millennial Teeth (Southern Illinois University Press, 2014), as well as a limited-edition chapbook, The Use of the World (Unicorn Press, 2013). A new chapbook, Of Air and Earth, will be published by Unicorn Press in April 2019. His poems have appeared in The Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, Five Points, The Southern Review, 32 Poems, The Best American Poetry 2017, two editions of the Pushcart Prize, and previous issues of Connotation Press, as well as other journals and anthologies. He is a professor of English at Coastal Carolina University.---------
America in 2019
after Shelley, after 200 years
An old, bald, despised man who would be King,
or Czar if he could, watches headlines flow
across screens like sludge from a swampy spring
all day. He fumes. He’s claimed he doesn’t know
a thing about supremacists who cling
to thumb-mute tweets, his high whistles that blow
in silence. Somewhere in a cold, dry field
a child is being hunted down like prey.
Whimpering about powers he can’t wield,
the journalists he’s not allowed to slay,
his cancelled parade, some indictments sealed,
or voting rights and health care unrepealed,
he shrugs, tents tiny fingers, says I may
or may not. We may have another day.