American Spirits

by Joe Gianotti

Do you live in a 600-square-foot home
in the smaller town ten miles south
of the small town, where you grew up?
How many children have you had
since you declared you would never have children?

Does your house need a new roof?
Do the windows leak heat?
Does the hot water run out too soon?
Do you have a fenced in backyard,
where cats come and go
like the transient you said you’d be?
Did you get that Indiana tattoo on your left thigh,
the one with the heart in the state,
meant to remind you of the roots
you’d never return to?

How much do you hate the man you’re with?
How much do you already hate the next man you’ll be with?
How much do you hate yourself and the life you’ve built?

How often do you think of the museum life
your old anthropologist self could have lived?
Brushing dirt from artifacts instead of dust from bookshelves.

Haute Couture

The Christmas card’s not right.
I got a balding headshot of the Senator
instead of the family photo.
What happened to the embellished wife,
the two appliqué biological children,
the flanking gilded labradoodles,
the tailor made adopted Downs baby
that would push his blue election
over the red hump?
Where are the green and white sweaters
each of them would wear in front of their
stitched Lockerbie Square fireplace?

She crushed them with judgment.
When she told me
that age one Lindsay’s left leg
would always thread out
like a brocaded baby from an O’Connor story,
she made sure to say
that cheerleading was out of the future.

She approved of the Senator’s robust porn portfolio,
adding a ruched Sasha Gray here
and a tucked Jenna Jameson there.
Have a drink
or two or three,
and go to as many Cubs games as you can.

Haute Couture begins so beautifully,
but in families like the Senator’s,
the lace gets sold on Ebay,
piece by piece.

BIO

Joe Gianotti grew up in Whiting, Indiana, an industrial city five minutes from Chicago. He currently teaches English at Lowell High School. He is a proud contributor to Volume II of This is Poetry: The Midwest Poets. Among other poets, he represented Northwest Indiana in the 2014 Five Corners Poetry Readings. His work has been published in Former People: A Journal of Bangs and Whimpers, Steam Ticket: A Third Coast Review, The Tipton Poetry Journal, This, Yes Poetry, and other places. You can follow him on Twitter at @jgianotti10.