Midwest
Waist deep in America Overdrawn on gasoline and
Chinese takeout
We roll downhill and
Wait for the floodwaters to carry us back up again
We’ve remortgaged our lives
And we’ll be dead before the balance comes due
These moldy walls
Don’t need to be rebuilt
With bleach in every bottle
This country will never come clean
My unwashed hair a pipeline from this to that
My eyes a cash register: no sale
My heart a finished basement
No sunshine but I spent a lot on it
And all the shirtless boys I’ll never meet
So serious and discreetly savage
Broken by technology and spitting up their pearly teeth
Down shipping corridors and out to an imagined coast
Set their cruise control for reckless endangerment
Careening knowingly
Into the thick of it
While I just pass on through
Darling Fitch is an American-born, Berlin-based writer, musician and performance artist. Their performance work has appeared in festivals internationally, including the Dixon Place HOT! Fest, the Edinburgh Fringe and the Month of Performance Art-Berlin. Fitch holds a merit award in fiction writing from the National Foundation for Advancement in the Arts. Recent poetry publications include Slanted House, Anti-Heroin Chic, Berlin Art Prizeand Transnational Queer Underground (TQU). In April 2018, Fitch finished the three-year durational multimedia project A Stranger Sound, an auto-ethnographic narrative of gender transition and community. They are currently touring Revelations: A Hopeful Harsh Noise Poetry Pop Opera About the End of the World and Our Place in It.