the mirage

Karthik Purushothaman

On the turnpike with Art & Paul
& Dean & Sal & Carlo & Bernie
Sanders hitching a ride to the market
I pick up a blue basket & a red one
clings on, slowly slides off & crashes
to the floor & I thought, well, at least
here’s a basket for my orange mango
drink as the orange man goes out like
a dictator who doesn’t have the balls
or the reins to the nation that believes
in Santa Claus, I say out loud but
secretly, I know the Tyrannosaurus
curled up & croaked like a sack of
sick pups in the nuclear winter
that awaits us, so congratulations,
America, you have a bowl full
of soul food & a soul full of
whole foods, your autumn is
as awesome as a kaleidoscope
is to an opossum that goes down
in a blaze of glory from national
park to parking lot to traffic cop
to the shopping cart of a microbe
on a moss-covered rock that's lucky
to get its cock sucked while people
are lining up all around the block
Bugses & Elmer Fudds socially
distanced at lengths of AR-15s
between them & I'm just Daffy
not wearing the mask because
we're going up a natural Stair
-master, i.e. mountain, bowing
my head at every turn to Bergen
County bankers pretending they're
surgeons operating on Manhattan's
asshole, Sinatra at the mountaintop
waging an uphill battle against Bruce
Springsteen on who’s the biggest
loser this fall throwing down
in the Jurassic Park of suburbia
slinging their tick-bitten dicks
not giving a shit about anything
other than proving nobody's better
than them at losing, two dinosaurs
duking it out, one wearing a mask
& one without, the Brachiosaurus
neck-slapping the Triceratops as
Israel displaces more Palestinians
in Gaza & no bridge over troubled
waters & no Simon no Garfunkel &
no Ginsberg no Cassady no Kerouac
& no Sanders did not find the nation
they went searching for & the asteroid
crashes unnoticed teasing the sequel
while we’re immersed in a game show
called America’s Next Top Dinosaur
counting the cars on the turnpikes
dosed on the new New Jersey Kush

Karthik Purushothaman is a poet from Chennai, India, who now lives in New Jersey. Currently finishing his first collection, Karthik has been nominated for the Pushcart Prizes and Best New Poets anthologies, was a special mention in Best American Nonrequired Reading 2019, and has had poems and essays in American Poetry Review (forthcoming), Boulevard, Hyperallergic, Rattle, Subtropics, The Common, The Rumpus, The Margins, EVENT, and Writers Resist: The Anthology, among other places.