Boys Will Be Boys Will Be

I never think about eating a volcano
because I don’t like hot things.

My nightmares are made of grown people.

Not the stubbed portholes
of snakes, their split tongues,
their infrared sight.

The scariest childhood dreams
recurred a blond, curly-haired me
flying as Superman

before I realized I am neither Julian
tendril’d or Krypton-born,

and dropped my stomach
into my throat.

In the gasping falls back
to consciousness, I watch

my mother honey-trap workers
in an attempt to improve her hive,

only to have them be boys swinging broken
promises like switches,

until all that’s left is shattered geometry,
a dirty half-mirror nestled in the green.

Look Soda

Even our machines doubt our use
of the native sounds we made
into names for cities, states, schools.

Only the Lakota may call the reservation
a kind of living joke, but the microphone
hears Look Soda. Siri, even you

were a beautiful victory over old Gods
before Apple and Google took throne.
What’s a Gen Xer but the next finger

wagging, When I was your age…?
Before Ohio was a river to freedom
it was named by People of the Longhouse,

the League of Peace and Power.
Whites have since parceled the land
into a sometimes swing state.

These kids today think it’s funny
to call in a campus threat
because they are the first generation

raised entirely on the Internet.
Scratch that, these kids today
have more opportunity to be known

for the same deviance that had us
line the stadium once Columbine
bloomed repeat pretenders.

Christopher Ankney’s first book, Hearsay, won the 2014 Jean Feldman Prize at WWPH. Post-publication, it placed as a finalist for the Ohioana Award for Poetry. His poems have been published in Boston Review (online feature), Electric Literature’s The Commuter, Gulf Coast, Hunger Mountain, Prairie Schooner, Verse Daily, and more. He is a tenured professor at the two-year College of Southern Maryland, and lives in Annapolis, Maryland, with his wife and two sons. Links to his work can be found at www.christopheranknkney.com.