15 MODERN ANALECTS

I.
Make?
Dadaist postmoderns
would say no.

II.
The ideal novel
skirts around little truths
with big words.

III.
If under a rock is the new Malibu Beach,
Darfur is the new acid sky of Venus.
Where we are, what can we do for it?

IV.
These glasses are an extension of me,
and yet I can’t feel the spider’s legs
skittering over the lenses.

V.
Red rover is too dangerous for school.
Let the children go safely home,
where the guns are kept.

VI.
So there’s flowing water on Mars,
but still no word
re: sanity on Earth.

VII.
Am I strange
because I can sit in an empty room
without telling myself to shut up?

VIII.
Spread your checkered picnic blanket,
and try not to think of the soil beneath
as a chutney of the dead.

IX.
If flags are the skin of a nation,
some old scabs
need peeling.

X.
Some nights I listen to the swamp frogs;
if I listen long enough,
I can tell which ones are the assholes.

XI.
The Qing Dynasty lapsed
a long, long time ago.
Why do I still see footbinding?

XII.
I’m an internet anthropologist.
It doesn’t pay well, and no one cares.
Just like a normal anthropologist, actually.

XIII.
As a child I feared clowns.
As an adult I fear a clown
becoming president.

XIV.
Maybe the anti-vaccine crowd has a point.
Really, what right do we have
to eradicate polio and measles?

XV.
You’ll find more truth in a neighbor’s trash can
than in all the stars in the Milky Way.
But goddamn do I love the stars.

Jonathan Louis Duckworth is an MFA student at Florida International University and a reader for the Gulf Stream Magazine. His fiction, poetry, and non-fiction appears in or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Fourteen Hills, Literary Orphans, Cha, Off the Coast, Superstition, and elsewhere.