By VERNITA HALL
Bottled Water Tastes Better
through a straw
because Things Go Better with Plastic.
Recyclable is the new biodegradable
because the light at the end of the tunnel
only seems brighter in a fairy tale.
I’d Like to Buy the World
a bespoke chapeau because
bitcoin is the new fascinator.
Don’t keep it under your hat.)
Climate Change—It’s the Real Thing.
Want a friendly forecast, a happy fortune
teller? Call Cassandra
because that social medium is a dead wringer.
You Deserve a Rhino Today because
Seven and a Half Billion Served is a lot
of bologna. Plutonium is more costly
than platinum because the nuclear
family is mushrooming. Because
today it’s a zero-sum zeitgeist.
Because the Marshall Islands.
Read everything before doing
nothing. I’d Walk a Mile for a—
DRINK ME, says the bottle,
and the little girl shrinks
to the size of a
glacier.
Vernita Hall is the author of Where William Walked: Poems About Philadelphia and Its People of Color, winner of the Willow Books Grand Prize and of the Robert Creeley Memorial Award from Marsh Hawk Press; and The Hitchhiking Robot Learns About Philadelphians, winner of the Moonstone Press Chapbook Contest. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Poetry, American Poetry Review, African American Review, Atlanta Review, Baltimore Review, Barrow Street, Potomac Review, Solstice, and The Cortland Review. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Rosemont College and serves on the poetry review board of Philadelphia Stories.
