Shane McCrae
Display Food
“We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”
—Donald Trump
America the lights along the highway
At night the streetlights look just like the eyelets
At the edge of the tarp behind which Kim Jong Un
Himself detains the sun America
From you I drive beneath them seeking you
And in what other country America
Could I within the country seek the country
And find it nowhere but the citizens are
Told in the citizens the country fails
America I am becoming white
In the white light in flashes no one knows
And still for every inch my afro grows
I wait a minute longer at the Wal-
mart deli but I find the real you there
Where what you see will not be what you eat
Fireflies Dying
Between the outside of and the inside of
My house between at the thinnest and the thickest
Point both the point at which the two are con-
centrated at the window downstairs where
The window unit is next both to the din-
ing table and the rest of the world there some-
where I can’t see but there I see black corps-
es clinging to the curtain above the pas-
sage what must be a passage through the fire-
flies crawl I think they couldn’t pass through flying
They pass through to a world I can’t imag-
ine from a world I can’t imagine to
The world I make from the world I dominate
By knowing it is separate from myself
They are the mind of the outside world they pass through
Thinking and die in the idea they reach
In the morning in the dark the fireflies look
On their backs on the floor like and at first
I think they are clocks blinking to be set
I know in the outside world they blink to find
Mates and in the outside world the intervals be-
tween blinks are longer and the blinks themselves
Are faster they are answering and waiting
For answers in the outside world from fire-
flies on the ground I know what’s happening
But I have looked and never seen the fire-
flies on the ground except I’ve seen the dying
Fireflies from the air on the floor blinking like
Machines awaiting input and at first
I think they are both stuck and loose in time
Shane McCrae’s most recent books are In the Language of My Captor (Wesleyan University Press, 2017) and The Animal Too Big to Kill (Persea Books, 2015). He has received a Whiting Writer’s Award, a fellowship from the NEA, and a Pushcart Prize, and he teaches at Columbia University.