I learned when I was an infant,
the lilac swayed just once.
Into a cart I knew no names
as the tornado brought
one more thing.
Push away for colors,
begin as icicles, can you?
Into the aisle, I was but a wind,
banged, remembered
of laundry, fascinated
against the tool shed
to turn detergents
by balloons, the door.
George Wallace was out.
When I wanted primary colors,
I lay assassinated,
lights to feel decorated
on the ground of Alabama.
Before I feel safe,
the plastic bags live,
you go to sleep,
head for the coolers
of Wonder Bread, and kiss,
full of gallons,
the election of Miss Black
America and gallons
of our souls and say
to her face
and Richard Nixon
that she was lovely.
It calms me and somehow,
America, this changed
when I think I felt
like a safe place,
our underwear, maybe
some place to lay down
one’s head, and everything,
English muffins on a soft pillow,
my hands growing
sore and unfamiliar.
There are eight
as the planes fly,
and potatoes churned
over our sleep in a Sputnik
to a package and kept us.
How did our hatred
check out, arranged,
keep us asleep? The girl
is nice like a row.
For so long she wears
the green of corpses in the arrangement of grapes.
Rustin Larson’s book Library Rain was released in 2018 by Conestoga Zen Press. Larson’s poems have appeared recently in Chiron Review, Exit 13 Magazine, Puerto Del Sol, and are forthcoming in Off the Coast, Evening Street Review, and Soundings East. His fiction has appeared in The Wapsipinicon Almanac, Delmarva Review, and The Iowa Source. The poem in this issue of J Journal will appear in the book The Philosopher Savant Crosses the River by New Chicago Press