It was an all hour war until it wasn’t.

JD Vance’s face caved in on itself.
People were walking on his nose.
Straddling his lips like a slide,
making cracks about his listless impotence.
Someone sat on his earlobe like a couch
then read him critical race theory
and tickled him until he cried.
The rest was crude and we moved away
from crudeness and dullness of all types.

Almost simultaneously, we forgot our phones.
Most of them stayed gone, sometimes popping up
freezer burnt behind the peas, inside old mason jars,
under the house, clogging the bathroom sink.
Some of us flushed them down the toilet.
The fishes asked us to stop sending junk mail
and we started listening. Finally, we started listening
Finally, things started feeling fine again.
Turns out the answer all along was to listen.
To put these spoiled children to bed
without dinner. We did it while they slept.
We took back their expensive toys and sent them to shelters.
We sent gift baskets to every country with long letters tied like bows
all scribbled full of poems about how embarrassed we were.
We begged them all to come over for tea, a party, bourbon,
or even just a full belly laugh, a long  nap about it all.

It felt good finally fumigating this old house
like we should have so many yesterdays ago.
It’s hard to admit termites had chewed us down to nothing.
And with the televisions in prison
the sunset showed up for us,
kept us company, stayed and stayed
into the night. It’s hard to admit
who we’ve been. How we’ve swallowed roaches
in our sleep. How we thought they tasted good
in the American dream. We tried to push the blinds
down but the sun was just too hot to bear.

Did I mention we gave everyone citizenship?
Everyone but Donald.
People all but forgot his name.
We ripped up the electoral college
and put it in the dog’s bowl
but even he wouldn’t eat it.
We took all the billionaires
and put them in a little gold steamboat
and told them they owned the sea.
And when they realized no one owns anything,
especially not the sea, we had already locked the gate
behind them. Somebody trained the sharks
to hate gold boats. We can’t really recall who.
And by the time Thanksgiving came, we forgot
to celebrate. And four days into July,
we looked back with wonder
but nobody ever wondered again
if We The People would be great.  

Samantha Renee Ratcliffe (she/they) is a queer Appalachian poet and songwriter from Kentucky working on her MFA at the University of Kentucky. Her work appears in Yearling, Pegasus, White Wall Review, Untelling, as well as numerous anthologies. Find out more about her writing community and reading series Hill Writers Collective at SamanathaRatcliffe.com or on IG @SamanthaRatcliffePoetry