Poetry Suite by Igor Brezhnev
"america,
can you keep your old promise"
Poetry by Igor Brezhnev
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good morning, america. it’s 2020.
good morning, america.
you burial ground haunted,
you darling riot, you earthquake
of a million footsteps, you chopper in
our sky, you mama-they-shot-me day
after day, you foreign affair, you tongue
in my ear, you ragged poet, you lost poem,
you make us believe in the apocalypse
daily, you weigh us for what we are
worth on your market, you billy
club kissing babies, you tear
gassed summer, you dollar
brand shining, you murder
in a stained uniform,
you sexy lie on tv,
you depressed
in my arms.
good morning, america.
you dive bar night wisdom,
you two-week attention span,
you bored cinema on our screens,
you drank too many of us in your
dreams, can you move, america?
you woke up with a hangover
and forgot your first name.
will you gobble us up for
breakfast, do you love
us, do you want us
like we want you, can
you breathe? i learned to
pronounce your name, can
you learn to say mine without
blood on your hands? america,
can you keep your old promise,
can you stop killing your children
on your streets, can we breathe?
america, please. good morning,
america. what will it be, love?
portland, oregon / june-july 2020
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поэт спрашивает: how many tongues does it take
to get to the heart of america
i claim american english
like pepsi and coke claimed
water around the world. wear it
like levi’s jeans bartered for trees,
blast your sensitive ears with lack of
articles like your troops blast children
in the rest of the world. i’ll throw words
from my other tongues over your adverts,
gevalt my way into the heart of the storm,
sing my кохання in your hamishagos like
i am paying back interest on lend-lease,
like i still belong in my quartered body,
like empires haven’t stolen our voice,
haven’t broken our lands for a cent,
i might’ve been iced, but madness
keeps my syllables flowing until
i lose a fight with myself. look
at how beautiful blooms
your next revolution.
look, your children
might remember
where your
wealth
came
from.
portland, oregon / 06.11.20
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Header image courtesy of Tim Okamura. To view his Artist Feature, go here.
Igor Brezhnev is a poet and a book designer, among his other sins. He is the founder of Wordlights poetry reading series (facebook.com/wordligthspoetry & wordlightspoetry.com) and of Lightship Press (lightshippress.com), a small press focused on publishing poetry. Igor has two full length collections of poetry published by Liquid Gravity Publishing, ‘dearest void’ (2016) and ‘america is a dry cookie and other love stories’ (2018), a spoken word album ‘Good Days & Bad Days’ (Lightship Press, 2018, igorbrezhnev.bandcamp.com), as well as a couple of self-published chapbooks in ‘nights since’ series which focuses on emotional landscape of being without a home. You can support Igor at patreon.com/igorbrezhnev and get daily poems & weekly audio recordings. More information about Igor can be found at igorbrezhnev.com.
