kevin chesser

Blessings from the Front Lines of the County Fair

I want to reverse engineer this poem 
from its title, as you can see, it’s a crisp 
title that’s easy to understand but 
also a little inscrutable with a note of American 
nostalgia 

I guess maybe it’s a fair where 
everyone’s shooting each other and 
burning each other 
alive 

They’ve dug foxholes 
around the ferris wheel and you can win 
medals of honor at the various games, 
like ring toss, tossing rings of 
flame 

Now that I come to it, why haven’t I 
ever seen a flaming ring toss at a county fair? 
Someone should do that, for the 
children

Politics

America the porous,
America the slotted spoon. You have no
friends. You look at a snake
like a snake is a leaf, you are stupid.
You’ve banned laughing
through hardship and forming
a gang on Halloween.

It all makes me so desperately sad. I feel
dumber than an effigy on Christmas. Is it raining
out there or inside my eyes?

I want to say something else that’s political—you all have not been
very nice to me