You said you loved us, and we thought you meant
curled fetus love, snuggled warm blood love, cozy
heart-pumping love of all that’s vulnerable:
nuclear winter to Orlando’s frozen Thames love,
his – no, her – transgender glittering mirror-self’s
unfettered love for the bric-a-brac of democracy—
discourse, diversity, equality.
What’s it to you, who doomed us to the cold
like spies skulking around with our evidence-based tools
jangling against words like enrichment, enforcement,
entitlement? Undercover, we speak with an accent
while despite you we encode the fallout, hoard these few
science-based relics of our recent past inside poems
because these are the last places you would ever look.
Lori Brack’s poems and essays have been published in journals (including Another Chicago Magazine, The Fourth River, Superstition Review, Mid-American Review) and anthologies (most recently, Rooted: The Best New Arboreal Nonfiction) since 2002. She manages a new project dedicated to developing Kansas artists in all genres.
Inspiration: The day after the CDC list appeared in the news, I saw a poem using them on social media and had an online conversation with poet friend Karen Craigo about trying our hands at the same thing. She alerted me to this project which gave me the impetus to mix the absurdity of banning words with my concerns about the rising threat of conflict with North Korea and my long obsession with Virginia Woolf’s writing.
The CDC Poetry Project 