SAPPHO TERROR (excerpt)

THE STATE DOESN’T WANT ME TO FIST YOU BUT WE DO IT ANYWAY
THE STATE DOESN’T WANT ME TO FIST YOU BUT WE DO IT ANYWAY
THE STATE DOESN’T WANT ME TO FIST YOU BUT WE DO IT ANYWAY
THE STATE DOESN’T WANT ME TO FIST YOU BUT WE DO IT ANYWAY

I’m trying not to be nasty.
 
 
We have to stomach the alarm of destruction.
 
 
We have to plump ourselves with the skin and bones of invasion. Fill up, flesh out. I know I’m feeling fattened with info.

When I always pay with money it goes to some sergeant or a person very very interested in oil. This is something that makes the human mind kneel. It is of utmost importance to the men behind the president
and around the president of this nation and the other nation that the money I always pay with and you always pay with goes to a very important pursuit of weaponry.

Push off from totality or ever always try something of the sort this is what your mind is trying to do.

What do you call it when you are a citizen and you are made to watch.
What do you call it when you are met with not a whisper, not a father, but with gore.

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from Sappho Terror–published by Prroblem Press

Buy it here

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Maura Modeya is a poet from northern Minnesota. Their work attends to the lived-in world and what haunts it, focusing on insomnia, the ghost of Sappho, U.S. empire violence, queer ecologies, and the reclamation of public space through wheatpasting. She holds an MFA from Naropa University and currently lives in Atlanta. Maura’s debut poetry collection SAPPHO TERROR is now available from Prroblem Press.