Dear Donald,

This piece appears in the upcoming issue of the Los Angeles Review of Books Print Quarterly Journal: The Epistolary Issue, No. 21 

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¤

Dear Donald,

Because I wish ill toward no one, I hope

this note finds you well enough to read it,

I guess. Truth be told, I've been thinking

about you a lot lately; there is not a day,

not an hour, not a minute that passes like

a cable news ticker I'm not counting off

with your infamously minute hands, and

though elders have always told me a poet 

is entitled to their obsessions, this attraction,

dare I say, is of an entirely different nature.

And we are of different breeds, which I

imagine is phrasing you favor using since

it evokes animal as animal evokes, say,

the African savanna or Central American

rainforests, places where people, too, live

and love on each other and maybe even

laugh, though in expressing this, what

I mean to make clear is that one of us

is the type of person who stares directly

into the sun and the other is the type of

person who stares directly into the sun,

but the misalignment in our thinking,

the disagreement that, perhaps, damns us

to mutual antipathy, is in regards to what

the sun actually is. I say a star and you

say a star and we’re not remotely saying

the same thing; your name’s been on wet

lips all my life, has been tucked into urban

radio braggadocio, talked about on television

and in checkout line tabloids for decades,

you, nearly as ubiquitous in the supple minds

of this country as Jesus is, and who is Jesus

Christ if not a superstar? This is precisely

what you’re considering, I gather, staring

singularly at yourself in any given situation,

the whole world a full-length mirror-mirror

on the border wall transporting you through

time back to the peak of your playboy days,

a certified star reaching for what he shouldn't

but believing it belongs to him inherently,

by sheer audacity. And since you’ve already

said goodbye to science, already fictioned

fact, I’ll spare you the astronomical details,

won’t stoop to lazy labels of stupidity on your

part and play along, as the lasting effects on

these dreaming eyes of mine are functionally

the same no matter what sense of star is used:

in any event, I can’t see clearly. Me, black-

sighted beyond physical ability, my hands

still on the proverbial wheel till they cuff me

or cut me down — it wasn’t so long ago that I

was a car-length behind the life ahead of me

when all the lamps hanging above the highway

went out. And, to my misfortune, that model,

though fast and sporty, had no orange or red-

glowing lights on the rear (budget cuts, I hear),

the make American like both you and I are

constitutionally, but when I say American
and when you say American, I know we

aren’t saying the same thing. One of us is

saying make this country great and the other

is saying make this country great; one of us

means praise me and one of us means save
me, and to that I can only provide cautions

to both of us, honestly, because people that

need saving will eventually make moves

to save themselves. But something tells me

you know that, are banking on it, literally,

somehow. Because you ain’t slick, Donny ―

and my peoples don’t slip. They don’t sleep.

They can’t sleep. Not with the sun still out.

¤

Cortney Lamar Charleston is the author of Telepathologies. Winner of a Pushcart Prize, his poems have appeared in POETRY, The American Poetry Review, New England Review, AGNI, Granta, and elsewhere. He serves as a poetry editor at The Rumpus.