Originally Published in print in the Spring 2018 issue of Wheaton College’s Rushlight Literary Magazine

A cluster of pilgrims are on a quest to get past the amber waves of grain 

scorched to kindling from tiki-torch marches: American Carnage. 

They are sifting through the alternative landscape 

of a fake country to locate the carcass of our reality.

 I don’t remember holding a funeral for mine.

Amidst the smell, metallic rust of Counterfeit monuments,

this is the new frontier they discover, hiking past rows of suburbia 

locked in paranoid palaces, icy and angular.

Where every shadow is the death clutch of enemies,

every voice is a conspiratorial curse, the hatred of the world

is bubbling and churning in flat pots of light and audio, 

contemporary cauldrons casting a spell on us all.

The pilgrims listen to it spout: War is peace, ignorance is strength, 2 + 2 = 5

just ask for the crowd size.

I check my phone for updates.

The pilgrims hear a whisper shuffling through high-plain winds:

We hold these untruths to be self-serving

that all men are creating evil. 

That they are endowed by their Newscasters

with uncertain unsolvable plights 

which among these are strife, 

bigotry, and the pursuit of angriness.

I turn the station.

They tunnel in these iron-bar barrens, lit with whirling blue-red glows,

wagons into the American catacombs, barbed-wire thickets locking

up those who dare to mumble in the dark.

I check my pockets for keys.

The pilgrims arrive on gasoline glazed boats to the new frontier

because there are oceans of Exxon oil, globular surf to voyage across, 

pipelines, like murky new canals to ferry down, 

smelling like evening rot and petroleum dew on the tongue. 

I am lighting my tap water on fire.

They paddle across this new hurricane- whipped frontier.

This “calm before the storm”-scape of flooded wastelands,

flotsam, infrastructural wreckage clumping into soggy nests

 of what once was. As the slime of a swamp seeps into the blood 

vessels, and rot eats away at sopping remains of alabaster cities.

My shoes are wet.

The pilgrims fly, jetting across this new frontier,

the skies are pummeled with the invisible force of the bomb.

Fire and fury of an Armageddon not yet here. 

But radioactivity is already crawling on the skin,

uranium ready to enrich the countryside with mutated scents.

I am writing this under my desk.

They run through this new frontier, bullets whizzing through every 

rugged crevice, and purple mountain majesty, stained maroon, then red.

They duck and find themselves in the shadow of the next great expanse:

A wall, a concrete two dimensional wilderness

to keep out this week’s manufactured boogeyman.

I touch the leather-bound safety of my American Passport.

The pilgrims go trudging through snow-capped carnivals

 where they’ve attempted to replace the masses

 by labeling them as snowflakes, but when you deride righteous anger

you better expect a blizzard of protest, to make things cold and unforgiving.

I am approaching a picket line.

The Pilgrims, growing weary, silent, beaten, now wait for an end 

to this new frontier, something, someway, someone

To be Walter Cronkite to these facts.

To see like a bridge in this gap.

To know the Spring through this Fall.

To go Berlin on this wall.