Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello | Conversation I Seem to Have With Too Many People

Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello is the author of Hour of the Ox (University of Pittsburgh, 2016), which won the 2015 AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry and the 2016 Florida Book Award bronze medal for poetry, and was a finalist for the 2017 Milt Kessler Award. She has received poetry fellowships from Kundiman, the Knight Foundation, and the American Literary Translators Association. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, The Georgia Review, The New York Times, and more. She serves as a program coordinator for Miami Book Fair.

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Also by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello: Hour of the Ox Last Train to the Midnight Market Many-Faced Poem

November 6, 2018
Poets Resist
2018 Midterm Elections
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Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello

Conversation I Seem to Have With Too Many People

Written after the 2018 North Korea-United States Summit Ask whether I think it was all real, this threat, these capsules all packed with nuclear light and a terrible flower. Ask me if I would consider going back now to risk raising a family. Ask if I heard about that senator from the south who said, But the war would be over there, not here. Ask me because you feel comfortable asking anyone who looks like I do whether we are from the North or the South. Say it’s too close, this stretching and engulfing blossom of war, like there isn’t already an ocean between us. Say it’s their problem, not ours. Say better them than us. Say it like there isn’t a flag of stars and stripes shiny as a belt buckle on the waist of the 38th Parallel. Say the tyranny of proximity is thirty miles from the DMZ to the capital, the same distance between Baltimore and Washington, D.C. Say twenty-five million people like it’s easy, like four thousand rounds an hour and sixty-four thousand casualties within the first three hours is easy. Say all options are still on the table. Say war is always an option. Say it like there aren’t twenty-eight thousand American troops still occupying the border. Go ahead. Say we’ve solved it now. Say you’re just looking out for us. Say it like you believe I’m part of this us.

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