MICHAEL CONNER

Love Poem for the Neoliberal Age

I don’t want to be radicalized by terror.
I want to feed mourning doves
from the palm of my hand in spite of it.

 Steady breathing, no tremors.
Offering what little I can before
all this gets reduced to statistics –

 plotting out the maps and graphs for how
to go on existing. What if, what if.
Negotiating the amount or razor wire
I would crawl through to get around the fence

            (which depends, I guess, on whether or not
you’re still there crawling beside me).

Every year eating approximately one credit card
worth of microplastics. Keeping the accounts current,
dancing through another dehumanizing transactional
relationship. I, you. I, it.

When we return to the dirt together,
how much will remain that hasn’t been spent –

            monocropped into toxic dust, burned out,
depleted of all nutrients?

I don’t want to be radicalized by terror,
But I am willing to die for a small plot of land

where we are the rich, dark soil spread beneath
the echinacea, watching the doves

eat from our daughter’s hand. 

Michael Conner is a writer and public health worker living in Swannanoa, North Carolina. He is the author of Total Annihilation (Bottle Cap Press, 2023). His poems have been published, or are forthcoming, in Hare's Paw, YNST, Neologism, and Spectra, among others.