The Systemic
Strange fall. Trees drop ballots into the yard
without fear of our tampering,
papers flipping along the curb as cars pass by.
Commiserating with my neighbor about our lives’
missed opportunities, we recall that season
decades ago when the ripest apples hung like half-punched chads.
We were children, then. We didn’t even notice
how decorum ferried our parents across their many failures
when they ought to have drowned.
Yesterday, I buried another squirrel.
Every morning, he’d gnaw on my plastic lawn chairs,
shavings accumulating across his tiny organs.
Is his death political? Everything is.
Different, though, those two politics, dying for and dying of.
Copyright © 2023 by J. Estanislao Lopez. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 20, 2023, by the Academy of American Poets.
“This poem began in imaginative flight, away from my state government’s constant efforts at voter suppression and toward, instead, a place of electoral abundance. From there, I let association fill in the world of that flight. A question forms in that world about inheritance, complacency, and the myth of apoliticism. I leave the poem with lingering doubts about my own willingness to put myself on the ‘for’ side of death’s politics rather than the ‘of.’”
—J. Estanislao Lopez
J. Estanislao Lopez
J. Estanislao Lopez is the author of We Borrowed Gentleness (Alice James Books, 2022). He lives and teaches in Houston.