What America Looks Like -- a poetry-photo

     Recent Presidential misstatements and distortions of American politics and policies are disturbing -- and I have pulled from my shelf a literary anthology This Is What America Looks Like. published in 2021 by the Washington Writers Publishing House and containing fiction and poetry from writers in DC, Maryland, and Virginia.  (Purchase is available at amazon.com.)  In this collection I found, in the poem "D.C." by Donald Illich, the phrase "here, where presidents lied" -- and since the poem contains a couple of quantitative words, I offer it below:

     D.C.     by Donald Illich  

             I'd never seen rats
             crawl down city streets
             until I came here,
             where presidents lied,  

             and people knew
             how to take the fifth.
             Now I fib with the best
             of them, to my partner,

             about where I was
             and who I was with,
             to my boss, who thought
             I was sick for a week,

             to the sky and the ground,
             which believed one day
             my promise to end in them.
             The rats understood.

             They twitched the truth,
             hid their falsehoods,
             Just before they ran
             across my booted feet,

             they squealed blood
             inside their fat bodies,
             left their feces
             outside my door. 

Let us work for a better future!