By L. S. KLATT
Permit me to apply these squares of American cheese to my spacesuit. Is it that I am a man? Or crazed? How will such a man make it in space, the consuming fire of reentry, & the joy of it? I am a fat man. American. Vienna sausages have always been sweet music to my fingers, yet the Germanics have done so much damage. Except the rocketeers who engineered the success of the American space program. And it was the Germans who are half- responsible for Ohio where Neil Armstrong was born. Could I advertise myself as a Kraft man, posting an American flag on the moon? Good question. Yes. But abetter one might be: what kind of heat shield would American cheese provide? It’s hard to believe that Ohio was once considered the Northwest Territory, that every small step west was a tap of the spacebar pitching us deeper into the shit. Frontiersmen wore leathers; what that did to their skin was barbaric. Yet Americans have come to occupy new worlds. BackspacefShiftiBackspacefShifti
New poems from L. S. Klatt have appeared or will appear in Birmingham Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Carolina Quarterly, Crazyhorse, and Denver Quarterly. His collection of prose poems, The Wilderness After Which, is due out from Otis Books (Seismicity Editions) in 2017.
