Three Poems by J. B. Hogan

 

 

If I Were Elon Musk

 

I’d buy a fleet of ships

to clean the oceans and rivers.

I’d send a big old check

to every humane society in sight.

I’d find something better

to do with my hard-earned cash than

spend it on a bunch of ten-minute rides to space.

I’d fund college grants for many, and

trade schools for many more.

I’d help preserve old cities,

restore broken down and rust belt towns.

I’d find something better

to do with my hard-earned cash than

shoot some hotshots down range.

I’d be investing in our needful people,

finding out what it was they were lacking,

working with the ignored and underfed.

I’d show the world what mattered,

how things can be fixed and changed.

Then I’d worry about my rich buddies

waiting to take that short little ride,

that fun little jaunt,

up to the edge of space.

 

One Time

 

One time it was all:

“aqui no se rinde nadie,”

Guardabarranco in the living room

of Casa Nicaraguense, and a

visit from Daniel’s minister;

going to the edge of Contra country –

El Coral and up Matagalpa way,

Sandinista homes back in Managua,

coffee co-ops in the highlands,

Good Friday in Leon and

then it was all:

hot, dry Xochicalco, darkly vibrant

Merida, little Ameca Ameca and

lush Oaxaca, the thick pyramid

outside Puebla, tourists on the Avenue

of the Dead and six blocks from the Zocalo –

reading Don Quixote in San Miguel de Allende after

drinking a beer at the Papagayo in Cuernavaca,

heading for Playa del Carmen, then back

for the train from Guadalajara to Tepic and

finally, a solitary toast to the new year in

Mazatlan, waves lapping softly against the sea wall

across the way, unseen in the deep moonless night.

 

Primer

 

Dressed all in black,

loose cloth rippling soft,

dark eyes and spirit –

Marx and Lenin her forté.

 

There were long distance calls,

decisions about whom to tell,

it wasn’t his first shot,

but he was the primer here,

black powder in pan

flash of fire, bringer of smoke.

 

But when the air cleared there

was nothing left, and not even

Marx and Lenin could

put this one back together,

primitive accumulation and

surplus value be damned.

J. B. Hogan has published over 290 stories and poems and eleven books, including Bar Harbor, Bounty Riders, Time and Time Again, Mexican Skies, Tin Hollow, Living Behind Time, Losing Cotton, The Rubicon, Fallen, The Apostate, and Angels in the Ozarks (nonfiction, local professional baseball history). He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas.