American Treasure

By Jill McDonough

Humorous poems are stark and blunt, and puts a magnifying glass on our prison systems and racial biases in America. At the same time, the poems try and make you laugh in the bleak outlook of the state of our country.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alice James Books
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781948579384

Book preview

ONE

Zero Slave Teeth

On the radio I hear about George Washington’s teeth.

A guest says what do you think his teeth were and a host

says wood. I’ve read about Waterloo teeth, how we prowled

battlefields, plucked teeth from young French corpses,

wired them into fresh rich people mouths.

I figure we’re about to learn the founding father’s teeth

were from his soldiers. But it’s worse than that: slave teeth.

I post this on Facebook, asking what might the reparations

be for having your teeth pulled, having to see your teeth

every day in your owner’s stupid mouth. Melodie posts a comic

from The Oatmeal: this is old news, the slave teeth thing, also

that people LOSE THEIR MINDS denying it. She posts

the comic and we watch the losing of minds unfold.

He had a wooden tooth (teeth)… zero slave teeth,

some stranger says, calls me a stupid cunt on my dad’s page.

My DAD. Zero slave teeth. No innocents on death row. No

lynchings, not all men. Everybody crying rape, not all slave

owners were bad. Sally Hemings? In love. Three hots

and a cot. Must be nice! FREEDOM FREEDOM USA!

Sonnet for Reading Aloud in Kidjail

The boys in my local juvie want to work one

on one, write stories, poems, mark up the stuff

I give them. More than one kid at a time’s less fun:

more fussing, more holding back to show how tough

they are. When one of them writes on the other’s paper

the germophobic one loses his shit; I get it, sit

between them while they write their poems. Later

I read them aloud so they can hear how good they are; it’s

like a magic trick, their words in my grown-up voice.

They still and listen, hear themselves, lean in on me

like children, because they are children. Two boys,

one on either side, a slow relax from anger in to breathe.

Their warm weights, cool of classroom, fresh pencils, stacks

of paper. Me feeling them thinking That sounds pretty good. Dag.

Our Star

"It’s from The Daily Galaxy."

—Susan Mikula

I tell Susan about walking around the Templo Mayor,

the pyramid in the middle of Mexico City. The gutter

for the sewer pipe they dug, a straight shot through

the ruins, 1905. How they must have been so over

all of it, the skull-shaped stones just another thing

to roll your eyes at, chuck out of your weary way.

Toss the fucking stone skulls on the rubble heap

with the feathered mantles, jaguar bones, python

skins, real skulls. I describe all this for Susan while

we wait in the waiting room for her dog, beloved Poppy,

who’s stashed somewhere getting chemo, and we talk

about how time works. Out the window the Roosevelt

Island tram slips back and forth along its wire.

Susan tells me when they tried to dig a parking garage

below LACMA, they unearthed a woolly mammoth stuck

in the tar pits, where the earth bubbles up to the top,

she says, so over all of that. She loves woolly mammoths

like she loves the Weimar Republic, googles ice baby

to find the third result, after Vanilla Ice, some ice-

cream truck: a baby woolly mammoth left behind

for us to find and look at on her phone between

Stichelton soup recipes and them giving us back

our damn dog. We read from The Daily Galaxy

on coronal holes, which spew streams of high-speed

solar wind. Oh, our star! We make a note to look up

the Carrington Event, learn someday how solar winds

can corrode pipes, disrupt even Susan’s Candy Crush.

Missile and Space Gallery, National Museum of the U.S. Air Force

All we want is to look all day at drones, the Kettering Bug

and Firebee, the hangar full of once-secret aircraft,

now decades old, still looking like our dystopian future, yours.

Also the rifle that shot the first shot from an airplane,

August 20, 1910, less than seven years since man first flew.

The next month Fickel and Curtiss repeated the experiment

using an Army semi-automatic pistol. We find blunder trophies.

Practice, atomic, and cluster bombs. Operation Carpetbagger.

Black Widow, Grasshopper, Hoverfly. We almost skipped

the Missile Gallery, tucked off to one side. When we walked in

we stepped into an enchanted circle of missiles, decommissioned

missiles pouring up like a redwood grove. Two Minutemans,

a Jupiter, Thors and Titans. A Peacekeeper, its naming-of-parts

poster topped with a faux-funky font: PEACEKEEPER!

The radar off Provincetown looks for ICBMs like this one,

new and improved versions of this one. The radar looks

for the end of the world, so we can make it worse. End

more. End harder. Yes, of course, deterrence, but still.

Everyone who walks into the Missile and Space Gallery,

its 140-foot silo, looks up and just says wow. Everyone.

When we did it we heard laughter, looked up to see people

who’d done the same thing. We took the glass elevator up

to the balcony to watch for more, watch the door, laugh

when we saw it again and again: wow and wow, then wow.

Joe Hill’s Prison

The Historical Society in Salt Lake still has

some letters, a pamphlet called "Joe Hill’s

Remains," even though he made it clear

he wanted his ashes scattered in every state

except Utah. Not wanting to be caught dead

here. The prison where Joe Hill died

is torn down now. Now there’s a Sizzler. Neon

and brick at the foot of mountains he must

have looked at through bars. They’re beautiful

mountains. They look like America, all majesty.

Rising purple up beyond the wall where he was shot.

Alone in Utah

I go out to eat because I’m lonely.

The waitresses are lovely. I tip