Winter in America 2.0

Photo Credit: Alessandra Capodacqua

12/21/24

There was an unidentifiable mouth on the path
we set out wintering after. Mouth as mute depthless gap
perfectly pear in shape imposed by gone automobile, having still half
its teeth, silver fuzz on residual ruff and tail hooked, reptilian, o-

possum: a Powhatan sound flattened in 1613 toward such “beast
in bigness of a pig and taste alike.” These syllables, too, strung
along to presume a habitat in loan, like hickory, tomahawk,
muskrat, raccoon, chum. Tāhtēhamena: we extinguish it. Chitty chitty bang

bang responds the algorithm. This was supposed to be
about the news. Heart rates rise, or rather the analogous holes.
Woman losing amniotic fluid cited for violating camping ban. Night shifts at frozen
pizza plants: 250 amputations, 370 broken bones. Lake Michigan froths at the heartland console

of this impracticable raft, no tides in range. A people bound in hatred of those found tangled
in the collar counties
Sent to scrub machines.

12/22/24

Sent to scrub machines, a welder at Deep Sky carbon capture toying with ocean old
acidifies your green speech. Smoking endless cigars in the hugeness, chuckling
scores of skulls stuffed into beloved national opera. The new climate gold
you can’t mess up, bomb on my hip when high she arches it. SoftBank can smell something
buckling

from 20 miles away. For a profit. My two-year-old can shop
for only one hour. Rush: scrubbing carbon from the mise-en-scène.
Pledging to slam shut the nation’s borders, the seafaring drone,
forbearing, bountiful, cuts a single note via the familiar mash-up.

Press the silver disc on a vandal-resistant state park hand dryer for the same
brief speech by tragedy and farce—by safety, sanitation, performance and compliance
made in Berkeley Illinois. Solstice bonfire swallows a couple hundred business cards reading CHA
CHA CHA; the quitting hurler incants “and may people be housed.”

While healthy profits pump planet-warming laws of holes for buying time,
the limed river slurry draws windfall from a stone.

From a series in progress

About the Author

Jennifer Scappettone

Jennifer Scappettone works at the crossroads of the literary, scholarly, visual, and performative arts. She is the author of the cross-genre verse books From Dame Quickly (Litmus Press, 2009) and The Republic of Exit 43 (Atelos Press, 2016), and of the critical study Killing the Moonlight: Modernism in Venice (Columbia UP, 2014). Her translations of the polyglot refugee from Fascist Italy Amelia Rosselli were collected in the book Locomotrix: Selected Poetry and Prose of Amelia Rosselli (University of Chicago Press, 2012) which won the Academy of American Poets’ biennial Raiziss/DePalchi Prize, and she founded PennSound|Italiana. Scappettone has collaborated on site-specific works at locations ranging from a tract of Trajan’s aqueduct below the Janiculum Hill to Fresh Kills Landfill.