Craving a plague to explain the malaise of a

frog slowly boiling in a pot of climate change

some punishment to pay debt piled to the moon

a reason to march to a death we can understand

together

                holding hands

no matter how much DNA we sequence

we can’t make medicine to cure what ails us

until we develop a microscope that

               peers

               deep

we strap on masks and can’t quite hear

               the muffled mumbles 

like tourists who don’t speak the language

                     we read eyes

we swim in the stench of what unites us

               afraid to take a breath

This poem by Mike Wilson recently appeared in Hitchlit Review, Vol. 3, Issue 2, Autumn 2020

he’s folded against the urine-soaked wall

like a note left in the rain, head down,

greasy gray hair a bad luck charm

                                                               I want

to turn away

so that I don’t fall into the hole he fell in

ambiguity circles his head like a fly

he is a bomb that could explode

            a body on a stretcher

decorated with flashing lights

red and blue

                       he is me

                                       he is you

                                                         he is

a warning from rich men with guns:

          don’t let go your ladder’s rung

This poem by Mike Wilson recently appeared in Hitchlit Review, Vol. 3, Issue 2, Autumn 2020

                                                    stand him up for Franco’s

firing squad cocked to kill urges crossing boundaries

bullets fly

                   to make Garcia Lorca’s body dance                           

Riddled corpse, shoveled in a shallow grave,

riddle me this:

                           What’s dirtier than a socialist?

A poof

             one sin hides the other

I see          AOC          she

wears hoop earrings

                                      smiles red lipstick

talks Green New Deal

                                         OMG Chiquita

have you gone bananas

neglecting your emotional work

bringing Wall Street down?

                                                   What’s more frivolous

                                                   than a socialist?

A flirt in a skirt

                            one sin hides the other

Malcolm, Martin made a fuss but

no one aimed the blunderbuss

                                                         until

they uttered blasphemy:

                                             racial unity means

                                             economic equality

It was decided

some must sleep

that others be not woke

                                            What’s more dangerous

                                            than a socialist?

A rabble-rouser

                             one sin hides the other

so no poet dare shouts socialism is democracy

lest bullets make Garcia Lorca’s body dance again

This poem by Mike Wilson recently appeared in Hitchlit Review, Vol. 3, Issue 2, Autumn 2020