day ONE HUNDRED and EIGHTY NINE

Elegy for The Orange Menace

The White Truth has been thinking about all the times his whiteness has been tainted. He remembers duels with Black Panther, The Falcon, El Gato Negro, how their blood trickled onto his crisp uniform to untuck a sheet. The White Truth channels all his pain into healing drops. He recites a poem:

The triumph of will may bring
the fallen back to our earth,
this world of eternal struggle.
It is not truth that matters,
but victory, reason reserved
only for the few. May our lies
remain big, our terror a bridge.

The White Truth cries enough tears to deny newsprint its ink. The climate around him changes. Orange liquid lifts from the ground to mix with clouds. It begins to rain. The White Truth feels his eyes burning away. He can’t imagine a world in which he can’t judge what he sees. At the hospital, the press calls. “Don’t worry,” he says. “It was a freak accident, an isolated incident.”


--Daniel M. Shapiro
(from the Chapbook The Orange Menace) 

Daniel M. Shapiro is the author of Heavy Metal Fairy Tales (Throwback Books, 2016), How the Potato Chip Was Invented (sunnyoutside press, 2013), and The 44th-Worst Album Ever (NAP Books, 2012). He is a senior poetry editor with Pittsburgh Poetry Review.