The cure to all the maladies that ail us | Jonathan Greenhause
won’t be scooped from a ballot box, nor delivered on the wings
of a dodo. You may ask yourself
why seek what’s extinct? Why brush your filling-packed teeth
with Sriracha, then wonder why your gums
are a 5-alarm fire? Your skin’s a jellyfish armored
with translucence, the paleontology
of a fragile skeleton divined underneath. Your stapled stomach
aches for wide open spaces, but your hunger’s a mouse
embraced by the wrong side of a metal clasp,
your busted front door
draped by a For Sale sign & a rusted chain. Apache helicopters
lay waste to your neighbors hastily relabeled as terrorists,
a miracle of precise projectiles
erasing their presence. You’re aiming to recover secrets
scribbled upon mildewed index cards
in a desk drawer gifted to The Salvation Army;
but right now, thousands of miles away, someone sets it ablaze.
About the Author:
Jonathan Greenhause’s poetry collection, Cupping Our Palms (Meadowlark Press, 2022), won the 2022 Birdy Poetry Prize, and he was the winner of the 2025 Goldsmith Poetry Festival Competition and the 2024 Teignmouth Poetry Festival Open Competition. His poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Gigantic Sequins, Qu, Salamander, Slippery Elm, and subTerrain.