MY NEIGHBOR TALKS WAY TOO LOUD

Flunking the Bechtel test,
she is talking, again, about her husband.
Who, when awake, seems
preoccupied by the height
of the grass in his lawn.
Or baseball.
My neighbor wonders aloud if
AOC is going to ruin this country
before or after she becomes
the first woman president.
She’s a communist, he insists,
bound to ban the Bible and take
away our freedoms like it was an
order of Chinese moo sho pork.
I don’t think he knows how this
Representative thing works; he is not
in AOC’s district; he is not in her time zone.
I try to give a 435th of my attention to
his frantic, fearful thought loop.

He looks at me, I’m sure,
a male of the species,
to see if I watch the Astros too, and if I
will grunt in agreement.
I consider at the way his belly—
“bought and paid for”—looks less
like a piece of masculine musculature
and more like a pile of elephant shit.
Shit. Shat. Shot.
The same guy has a few guns
he likes to take to gravel quarry and
plink at bottles and cans.
Because recycling is for pussies.
Because a good firm recoil
is the stuff of wet dreams.
Consider this the same guy who
risked sunstroke to carry a watercan
and soak my new fruit trees last summer when
my grass was sweating toward brown.
We were out of town and heard about it
from the neighbor’s kid on the other
side who cuts our grass and knows where
the irrigation controls are.
Funny kid.
I believe he watched the sweating guy
lug the water from the console of
electronic teenship.
Bummer, boomer.
I value my neighbor’s consideration and
left him a cold six-pack.
Like AOC would, you know,
with the best intentions.