VOTE BUSH

For George W.

If it was my bush running the world,
the only thing we’d have to worry about
would be eating too much sugar
or sitting around in a wet bathing suit bottoms.
Instead of cracking heads
or patriots cracking down,
I’d see that each household had
a teabag of Pau d’arco in every pot
and a jar of acidophilus in every fridge.
The itch around the bikini line
could pose problems across party lines,
but the new world order would be diversified,
multicultural as well as multi-seasonal.
The shrub-like spread of
the New Jersey winter bush
or thin sunny strip of Brazilian fur
would be tenable
as the clean shaven all over America.
War would be superfluous,
as a shotgun wedding.
Babies of any race, creed, color,
or angelic affiliation,
would be welcome to exit my sacred space,
exist in my arms without the fear
of a random burst of smart bullets,
the new napalm of a Mark 77 firebomb blazing in,
or “depleted” uranium radiating
around them with its half-life of 4.5 billion years.
Peace would not need a super absorbent
tampon to stop all the bleeding.
Ask not what my vagina can do for you,
but what you can do for my vagina.

—

Pamela Hughes’ full length book of poems, Meadowland Take My Hand, is forthcoming from Three Mile Harbor Press. Her work has been published in The Paterson Literary Review, Canary, Thema, The Minnesota Review, The Red Wheelbarrow Anthologies, The Brooklyn Review, Literary Mama and in other journals. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from Brooklyn College where she studied with Allen Ginsburg. She is the editor of Narrative Northeast, a literary and arts magazine.