Eric Elshtain

“The King Business”

We cleaved the foot

of main street

then wove in wait

goading militia men’s

telepathetic march

of rumdums, like underemployed

paraders stunned

by redwood momentos
our brains be child with.

History’s theater—

it’s curtains, they say
in the cupolas

of buildings in State,

traced faces ushered

across aisles, spelunkers’

lamps shooting beams of newsfeed,

language wasted on grammars
we’ve gotten off of…

Selectoral colleges

sloganed in the usual
hunger bank on our belief

in the sweetest trivia

squeezed in their fists.
Oil in result is rigged,

given us as juice:

here are the hypos,
creepy mills filled with grit,

human hearts turned

to hotbox fauna
gotten bent on the Front.

Bees to burn, money-men

raffle flunkies and false cures

while we’re down

on our uppers, double-

jointed, stooping like queens

of nothing at their foots.

Eric Elshtain is a homemaker and also the poet-in-residence at John H. Stroger, Jr. Hospital and UIC Hospital where he conducts poetry and art workshops with patients through Snow City Arts. He also teaches literature at the Better Boys Foundation in Chicago. Elshtain's poetry, reviews, and interviews can be found in McSweeney's, Skanky Possum, Notre Dame Review, Ploughshares, American Letters & Commentary, Interim, Salt Hill, GutCult, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Fact-Simile, Kennesaw Review, and other print and on-line journals. He has a book forthcoming from Verge Books and has been the editor of Jon Trowbridge's on-line Beard of Bees Press since 2001.