– After American Music Festival - New York City Ballet by Keith Haring
If we’re going to keep dancing of course we need
stars, stripes, red, white, blue, yellow, and you.
If the show must go on of course we request
music, flying splits and backflips.
What did you expect? The magic of the handclap
is the produced beat. The magic of the canvas
the flag that waves there without wind or pole.
The show must go on even when the dancers
are tired or the director is ill—we learn
this from a young age in America. All this
hard work will pay off—just you wait and see.
When the 16-year-old says there’s a mouse in her room
I head to Menard’s and purchase ten traps,
and then return to bag the debris:
McDonalds fries, make-up sponges, sliced
eyelash extensions, and shredded seas
of used tissues. On the couch, she takes a nap
while I bait each trap with peanut butter.
I search for dime-sized holes that mice
could enter. In her closet, I’m slapped
with the odor of Cheez-Its. Free
scraps and piles of clothes have promised
rodents a haven. In the dark, once safe under
her dresser, long dresses, and shoes, they flee
from my vacuum—its roar an alarm that zaps
them to the reality that this nice
kingdom is crumbling. Is it hyperbole
to say they lived like kings who plundered,
ate, scurried, and mated like no other mice
ever had or ever will? They gorged on every vice
along with the human who once called me mother.
After I’ve finished, I ask her to please agree
that she’ll keep the room clean. She won’t take advice.
Despite her fear of mice, I’ll find another wrapper.
I await the crunch of the next snap.
Jungle with Setting Sun
– After Jungle with Setting Sun by Henri Rousseau
The pink, white, and yellow flower heads bob
12 to 18 feet overhead. With the jaguar,
they attack, and isn’t that what the modern
one desires? A fight with nature that
demolishes every plant and beast until
the man sits on his throne of gold
and diamonds shining like the sun?
The prophecy of the 11th hour on
the 11th day depicted here with
11 blooming witnesses to tyranny—
the war to end all wars, the peace
to beget all peace—is an illusion
like the orange circle, like the giant
trees, like everything we’ve ever
painted or written or sung, like
our forgotten humanity.
Cat Dixon is the author of What Happens in Nebraska (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2022) along with six other poetry chapbooks and collections. She is a poetry editor with The Good Life Review. She works full-time at a funeral home and teaches creative writing part-time at the University of Nebraska, Omaha.
