appealing

The Maynard
Spring 2014

Kayla Czaga
0:00
 
Profanity Warning
 

Poem for Jeff

The Korean shopkeepers are fucked. The students reading
by the dim light of their textbooks are fucked. The couple
fucking on a kitchen table in a loft on 3rd Avenue is fucked.
The hipsters, plastered in wallpaper pants, blazing ambient
noises through hamburger headphones are fucked. Fucked
are the CEOs and the graceful lines of women buying oranges
in December. The senior citizens shivering in complexes.
The fucked mutter slender apologies to each other—I am sorry
your loved ones perished in a fire, that life has fucked you
with such regularity, there are no jobs or cities safely to live
in, I get it, Matthew Arnold’s ignorant armies skirmish on,
making old the new year, again. The lady with bolts of hair
selling painted spoons down by the harbour is fucked blatantly
while others are fucked subtly, gradually over time, eroded
with great misguidedly fucked love and passivity, each howling
out a verse of the failing song of the fucked, and I know it
does not undo the fucking, but it’s beautiful, sounding out over
the ocean, startling the exquisitely fucked heron into flight.