Deborah Bacharach
How Not to Accept the Trump Regime as the New Normal
Get a goldfish, maybe
from Mexico or Iran. Watch tiny gills
in synchronous motion.
Watch it gasp.
Stomp on it so fish water splatters
your pant leg, gold fish guts
cover your sole. Don’t move on.
Stomp again and again so you feel
the almost invisible
splatter beneath
your awesome and capricious power.
Wear those pants four years.
If they dry out, get another goldfish.
Only a couple bucks at the pet store, or you could
win one for free at the state fair.
Make sure to stomp the life out of it.
Get ready to be yelled at. You crazy
motherfucking bastard why would you do that?
What did it ever do to you?
Deborah Bacharach is the author of After I Stop Lying (Cherry Grove Collections, 2015). Her work has appeared in Poet Lore, Arts & Letters, Blue Mesa Review, and The Texas Review, among other journals.Her work has also appeared in Jump Start: A Northwest Renaissance Anthology (Steel Toe Books, 2009), edited by Lonny Kaneko, Pat Curran, and Susan Landgraf; A Fierce Brightness: Twenty-Five Years of Women’s Poetry (Calyx Books, 2002), edited by Margarita Donnelly, Beverly McFarland, Micki Reaman, and Carole Simmons Oles; and Sex and Single Girls: Women Write on Sexuality (Seal Press, 2000), edited by Lee Damsky. She is a writing tutor in the Seattle. Find out more about her at DeborahBacharach.com.
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