Woodrow Wilson
For my ninth birthday
my grandparents gave me a book
of presidents which stopped at JFK.
I often leafed through it, skimming
the few paragraphs on each,
which never criticized–
they all had magic
it would seem. But #28—
I taped a paper over his face.
He looked like he could dash out
of the binding and eat me alive.
Woodrow Wilson. A stern-faced
Princeton prof. I later learned
he worked to the point of strokes
to get countries to talk
instead of fight. Yet ramped up
segregation, admiring
Birth of a Nation
for its Ku Klux crapping.
The book yellows in the basement
under cat litter and a few
cracked 45s. Wilson, is that you
I hear wandering up the stairs?
In your tidy suit? Your white sheet?
Kenneth Pobo had a book out from Circling Rivers in 2017 called Loplop in a Red City. Forthcoming is a book of prose poems called The Antlantis Hit Parade.