day NINE HUNDRED and FORTY

Priorities

A misplaced coffee cup
on Game of Thrones
brought the internet to its knees,
while in other parts of the world
two people die per minute
in an endless series of wars.

In the United States, we have
forty thousand gun deaths per year,
and two million homeless veterans.

Our infant mortality rate
is the highest of any developed nation,
and our average life expectancy
has decreased for three years in a row.

The rich slobber over plates
of filet mignon, while twelve percent
of our citizens go to bed hungry,
and 6 in 10 Americans
can’t raise $500 in an emergency.

Meanwhile, ten million people
watch Game of Thrones every week:
its horror an inoculation
against real life violence.

This is how vaccines work:
ingest a tiny bit of the poison
as protection against the actual disease.

Sometimes this strategy
backfires, and violence spills
into our schools and churches,

but at least we can still laugh
over a misplaced coffee cup
on a film set and remember
to tune in next season
for a new dose of toxins.

--Leah Mueller

Leah Mueller is an indie writer and spoken word performer from Tacoma, Washington. She is the author of two chapbooks and four books. Her next two books, "Death and Heartbreak" and "Misguided Behavior" will be published in Autumn, 2019 by Weasel Press and Czykmate Press. Leah’s work appears in Blunderbuss, The Spectacle, Outlook Springs, Atticus Review, Your Impossible Voice, and other publications. She was a featured poet at the 2015 New York Poetry Festival, and a runner-up in the 2012 Wergle Flomp humor poetry contest.