Adrian C. Louis
Sasquatch Sonata
Nebraska Panhandle,
nearing the millennium,
and good old public
radio is covering
the 2nd Inauguration
of the Arkansas
cockhound and I
can’t help but recall
the first one when
the rich, black poet
inside my battered
radio intoned in
an old-time preacher
voice awkwardly word-
stringing a necklace
of dead tree branches,
chunks of concrete and
Simply Good Morning!
to a hopeful but brain
dead America and the fat,
newly elected President
by her side so blissfully
unaware of the comic
weightlessness of her words
and what can I say when
four years later I look
out the window and see
the blonde children of
the New Aryan Army
goose-stepping past
my house and today when
I’m driving ever so slowly
to the nearest Safeway
I see below the pines,
in a fallow cornfield
between Chadron and
Bordeaux Creek a huge
bright billboard with
the face of a sleek black
man, maybe Air Jordan,
I’m not sure, but he’s
wearing dark glasses and
a can of Coke is reflected
in his shades and Oh God,
there’s not a single black
family for a hundred miles
in any of the four sacred
directions and that’s the way
the white farmers like it
and God, they’ll tell you
it’s bad enough dealing
with us Indians and our crap
and Christ, there’s something
fleeting through the pines,
dark and covered with hair,
moving fast, a speeding blur
and it might be a sasquatch or
maybe Lew welch down
from the hills to cop
some Twinkies and talk.
Page(s) 155-156
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