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Matthew DeMarco

Biogeography

 
“Whoa, here’s to the land you’ve torn out the heart of. Mississippi, find yourself another
country to be part of.”—Phil Ochs, “Here’s to the State of Mississippi”

 
Phil, I’ll let it be that the geography
you outline is a body, and I’ll extend it
 
sans the tempting, projecting refrain.
Here’s to the land who’s torn out
 
the heart of? It must be the highways
pulling down the heartland to the gulf
 
or the rivers that wash away the bodies,
now cells, that you image. The highways
 
pulling down the blithe ignorance of middle
America, the cornfields and pick-ups, and all
 
other host of white blood cells sunk in the pit
of your Mississippi. And let’s pretend that
 
the heart was even fit and not smoke-tarred.
You’d agree it was ill, but it was more important
 
to attack the Mississippi pit. If it’s not the heart
of our country, then in your metaphor, what is it?
 
Some cancer-stricken receptacle of the nation’s
waste, perhaps some colon attached
 
to the sea? But here our song becomes a waste. Of course
the disease is real, but what of the transplant?
 
What if you cut Mississippi out and sutured it
to Mexico or Cuba, Colombia or the stateless
 
Western Sahara? This poem is not fit
for a singalong, I’ll readily admit, but that’s
 
sort of the point. Those cross-legged hippies
you sang to in New York would have no problem

saying damn it all; throw out the state with its
governor. Here there are real people, in your metaphor
 
real cells, all fighting the same disease as effectively,
or not, as they can. And if it were to drift away,
 
here would be the heartland with a road to the sea.
Here would be our dirty American heart pulsing
 
sluggishly, feeding one less organ the blood it needs
to keep its cells all processing and functioning. Here
 
would be our heart hemophiliac hemorrhaging all,
all of its good blood in a steady stream to the sea.
 
But let it be, instead, that the land is an organ on which
all beings and plants are cells that die and grow and live,
 
and before and after any state or trend or song or house,
before and after the many oppressors and their laws there is only
 
the real land. The organ made of dirt and mineral on which
we build our body. Tiny microorganisms constructing the whole,
 
a body riddled with scars that are the refrains we carry
in our lungs when we sing our new songs after the waste
 
dries up in the sea.




--
Matthew DeMarco is a writer and editor living in Chicago. His work has appeared on Poets.org and in Columbia Poetry Review, Ghost City Review, Landfill, and elsewhere. Poems that he wrote with Faizan Syed have appeared in Dogbird and are forthcoming in They Said, an anthology of collaborative writing from Black Lawrence Press.

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  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025