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50 LOUISVILLE MAGAZINE 7.15 Political Poem The country is not what it was. I miss the arc of green freworks in spring & the moral bellies of lake trout rolled in four. This universe is so dry, star-sharp. Each day, my arms grow long but never reach the other shore. The line of it bends like a fern in rain. Birds chatter towards justice towards justice towards justice towards justice — Their beaks click together like dolls. I study the arc of my own slithering chin as it bends along the waterway of my phone. The moral is a glass canoe lodged in a long but fnite block of aluminum. I tell you: This universe is not worth my hard-earned glitter. This universe is not what I dreamed. Wings careen in the blue, towards justice & I watch from the dirt, my feet burning. I long, but I can't measure my longing, can't trace the arc of my tears as they depart from my head. Now the moral autobus kneels like a camel at the curb. It bends & I climb into the sinking dark. I climb. It bends. This forced union is not what I've loved. A universe is supposed to tingle, like stars-in-branches or the moral constellations of strawberry seeds, arranged towards justice. But I don't know how to read stars, the arc of brilliant dust that governs me. My body is long, but nobody invites it to lie down. Go along, get along, but you can't lie down. My sweet, harmless body, it bends so you can't identify my color, just the arc of my spine, which could be anyone's, in the cool universes of love. So I let my blank body turn towards justice & away from countries. Let it curl up like the moral fortune still inside the cookie, the moral border dissolving in cold milk. Won't be long but everything we know collapses towards justice: bodies, berries, beaks, barns. All of it bends & washes under the moon. Still, this universe is someone else's calculus, the arc of a moonbeam in the moral frmament. It bends & the light is long, but dimming. Such universes. Here, I draw the arc of two words: just is. Best Poet Kiki Petrosino In this original poem, Kiki Petrosino, director of U of L's creative writing department and author of the poetry collections Fort Red Border and Hymn for the Black Terrifc, uses words from Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Our God is Marching On!" speech, which has the line: "How long? Not long, because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." She also includes lines from John Wilkes Booth's journal: "The country is not what it was" and "This forced union is not what I've loved." "They're both really fascinating American documents. They're written at different poles of history, but they're both making a claim about what America is or what it should be," Petrosino says. "I wanted to think about Martin Luther King making this claim. We're supposed to take comfort from it, but sometimes the horizon is hard to see." Petrosino wrote the poem in sestina form, which requires poets to repeat certain words in certain lines. Using quotes added another constraint to Petrosino's process: She had to repeat the words of others. The form dictates that the last word should be "justice," but Petrosino transforms the word into a phrase: "just is." "I knew I had to end with 'justice,'" she says, "but it's a little off. Maybe we're not quite at justice, but we are at 'just is.'" — DJ CRITIC'S CHOICE Photo by Aaron Kingsbury