Three poems exploring the toxic effects that today\u27s populism is having on families, society, and the environment. The selection includes “How We Got Here,” “Beyond the Ticket Booth,” and “The End of Conversation.

Peterson, Jason David

English

University of Kentucky

disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory Volume 29 Populism Article 3 7-2020 Poems on the Effects of 21st Century Populism Jason David Peterson Twin Cities Poetry Workshop DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.29.02 Follow this and additional works at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure  Part of the Poetry Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Peterson, Jason David (2020) "Poems on the Effects of 21st Century Populism," disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory: Vol. 29 , Article 3. DOI: https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.29.02 Available at: https://uknowledge.uky.edu/disclosure/vol29/iss1/3 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory. Questions about the journal can be sent to disclosurejournal@gmail.com                   © 2020 The Author(s). This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author(s) and the publication source are credited.  https://doi.org/10.13023/disclosure.29.02  disClosure: A Journal of Social Theory Vol. 29, July 2020   Poems on the Effects of 21st Century Populism Jason David Peterson, Twin Cities Poetry Workshop  Three poems exploring the toxic effects that today's populism is having on families, society, and the environment. The selection includes “How We Got Here,” “Beyond the Ticket Booth,” and “The End of Conversation.” Keywords: poetry, family, environment, society.      How We Got Here  We ate everything in the house. The yard picked clean— nothing even that any starving memory could hold out for. We ate our anger and soon our love and the patience of others. We ate our hunger and moaned as it grew heavier inside us. We ate the world raw and the bitter green and salty blue and endless black on black went down in a flush of burn and clay. We ate the future before it limped away. We ate the rules of all of this, and now it has no meaning. As if nothing was ever made or eaten— an infinite nothingness that won’t digest, and so there is only us.                             Peterson                 disClosure, Vol. 29: Populism               2       Beyond the Ticket Booth  Held waters dislodge in a rage oceans rash, pale as salted grass and caverns cave, the sky’s  grey head pinned to the valley by the cold boot of rotation forced to take all of this in.  I am watching a spring of summers buried under the fall of winters  a furious sun towing the black sheet faster than the chariot could ever pull her  an ashen rain we’ll soon gather and weather. Think of them all—  the incredible things we’ve done to fuck things up— I want this to be the end  we paid for, some ragged stub to let us know we got our dollars’ worth of show.                 Peterson                 disClosure, Vol. 29: Populism               3  The End of Conversation  Anyone can scream. They’re doing it in rounds —overworked throats and played-out phrases decoupage our city in pith and spittle, so how can I tell you of outrage? A whisper carefully delayed, a currency in flames, an act of kindness?  There’s no wrong answer but we all still lose, gasping in the crowded air.  If I were dying now of that very violence, it would kill me faster having to explain. So I lie in silence, wave my arms making logic angels in the massacre of words, and wait for a new sound to articulate. 

Poems on the Effects of 21\u3csup\u3est\u3c/sup\u3e Century Populism

https://uknowledge.uky.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1494&amp;context=disclosure

Poems on the Effects of 21\u3csup\u3est\u3c/sup\u3e Century Populism

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University of Kentucky