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EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Poem
by Zachary Schomburg


Last President of a Dark Country

Try being the last president of a dark country. It is lonely as hell here. You should come. But be careful not to venture far from the entrance on your own—there are no landmarks. The only thing to be found here is darkness. It is always night and there is not even a night. There are no people, only shadows, and there are not even any shadows.

Except, if you are careful, you can find the railing. It will lead you to a hole. Yes, somewhere in the center of all the darkness, there is a warm dimly-lit hole that you can climb down into. You’ll find me there, most likely. I’ll be writing my last presidential address. It will be a list of all my darkest secrets. No matter how much you ask me to read it, I probably won't.


Last President’s Address

                         a farmer losing everything in the combine,
a falling piano with a vendetta,
a black plastic invisible telephone,
a family of ghosts who are tourists hitting all the death scenes,
young lovers with only four limbs between them,
a roomful of smoking guns,
the empty shell of a fruitless farmer,
a tornado of limbs,
the telephone that has been ringing since the beginning of time,
two farmers dying of identical wounds under the hot sun in separate but adjacent    stretches of a corn maze,
a tree with people limbs and vice versa,
the last pianist dying slowly inside a piano built for two,
an emptiness the exact size of a room,
a telephone booth filled with dead bodies outside a motor lodge filled with smoking    gunmen,
a fire that burns in the center of complete darkness.