day FIVE HUNDRED and FORTY ONE

Maybe the World Has Decided to Lose Its Mind

The same company that cloned Dolly the sheep

has successfully cloned a primate.

but they assure us that the process

is still a long way from producing human babies

even if it were ethically permissible.

And you take comfort in the term ethnically permissible

because you do not want to think of

row after row

of small cribs

in a science center somewhere.

You do not want to think what they would do

to those babies, especially if they were brown.

You do not want to think of what they could do

if they didn’t see those babies as babies

didn’t see people as people.

What could happen when corporations get involved.

You close your eyes.

This all feels like too much science fiction

except the police are executing Black people in the streets

and they are locking

kids in cages.

They are selling up our democracy piece by piece

for their own gains,

as they watch us tear each other apart.

So maybe it isn’t too much of a stretch.

Maybe the end times are here.

Maybe the world has decided to lose its mind.

Maybe we are past the point of going high

when they go low.

You are not sure, but you will lock your door at night

and check it again before dawn.

You will try to keep what you love on this side of the door

for just a few more hours.

Outside they are shifting the goalposts yet again.

By morning you will wake in a world you don’t recognize

far from the one

you wish you could remember.

--Ally Malinenko


....in a little self-promotion news, my new poetry collection The Philosopher's Ship

is out on Alien Buddha Press and can be purchased HERE