Feast of the Circumcision- A Guest Submission from David Lohrey

A guest submission from David Lohrey, edited by one of our editors, Willow Kang!

There’s a holiday for everything; if you look hard enough, there is.

Nothing a wee drink can’t cure and some time alone can’t improve.

I’d say, in America, anyway, the only holiday I ever liked was the

one they now want to cancel, Thanksgiving.

Father loved to cut the turkey, chop it to bits, pull out its bones

by hand and snap them in two. When we were through, he’d find

something to do with the bones, boil them with chopped carrots,

and make what he called soup. We ate turkey sandwiches for weeks.

I don’t remember ever giving thanks to anyone for anything ever.

No, they may have called it Thanksgiving but we kept our thoughts

to ourselves, yessiree. (Fuck Bob.) The saints come marching in and

the townies raise the rent. That’s another thing my uncle used to say.

Demosthenes couldn’t hold a candle. Cicero and other Romans, including

the historians Sallust and Tacitus, knew a thing or two. One thing was clear:

the importance of dangerous women. The orators were putting their lives

on the line. Public pronouncements could be caustic.

There were epic put-downs: ridicule and denunciations. This made the Romans

scary. Treachery and intrigue ruled the roost – what fun! Juicy parts for the likes

of Glen Close and Sharon Stone: poisoned baths and whipped backsides.

Talk about the deplorables! They devised verbal assassination plots.

Hell is an equal opportunity employer. Hallelujah. We’d prefer, it seems,

to put a cap in our opponent’s ass. John Adams, America’s Founding Father,

wanted his kids to write poetry, screenplays. We’ll know America is back,

when people once again value the power of words and the right to speak them.

Read Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Adams loved the Romans. Lincoln, too.

People obsess over the right to bear arms; they want to carry concealed weapons.

Of greater power is one’s tongue. A golden voice or a pistol? If not writers, then

anthropologists; someone in this country has to study ancient languages.

When the bombing starts the president’s artistic son can suggest we not bomb

ancient sites or capital cities. An artistic education might come in handy. With

presidents this low, we’ll have to depend on children to write their epithets. Why

would a successful businessman want his sons and daughters in trade?

Let that son of his keep his prick, that’s all I say. If he wants to join the ballet,

who cares? If he wants a 16-year-old boyfriend from Cyprus, let him be, but don’t call

him a girl; don’t name him Sue. Don’t make him wear high heels or let him wear

his mother’s earrings. Let’s stop this obsessive worship of the limp dick.

Our business class produces clerks and bondsmen only; if not from the rich, from

where are our artists and historians to come; who else can afford Manhattan rents?

Our God doesn’t believe in sharing; ours is a religion of hoarding. Membership’s

limited to the greedy; fuck the needy. They’ll get financial aid in Heaven.

We’ll know it’s here when the cherry blossoms fall and the hibiscus blossoms.

No more tears. All women will have big breasts. Plastic surgeons will join in

the harvest as fieldhands rejoice. There will be no more universities, only ignorance.

It’s what we have been waiting for. Bowel movements will be televised.

The news of the day will be read from a podium at the White House. There will

be daily parades. We’ll make the president himself a majorette. She’ll wear nothing

more than a cotton yukata, not a stitch more. She’ll perform in digital blackface,

known to all as the man of the hour. At breakfast, she’ll be Cuban; by lunch, Chinese.

Hell is an equal opportunity employer, and everybody knows it. Hallelujah.

The Starship Enterprise is right there on the horizon and so is “Top Gun, Part 3:

Roman Candles.” When we look back, people will say, it wasn’t so bad. They

may even say we never had it so good. Trust me. Utopia is nigh.

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David Lohrey was raised in Memphis and is now based in Tokyo, Japan. Lohrey’s work highlights how the absurd and the banal mingle across the terrain of America’s advanced cultural dementia. His first book of poetry, Machiavelli’s Backyard, draws on his experience growing up in the era of Martin Luther King’s killing, Patty Hearst’s kidnapping, and Watergate. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Mountain Review, the Delta Review, the New Orleans Review, Obsidian, Stony Thursday Anthology, and Dodging the Rain. A multiple Pushcart Prize nominee, David saw his second collection, Bluff City, published by Terror House Press.

This piece was edited by one of our editors, Willow. Reach them at @oldmanheart, on Instagram!