On This Day in History

I sat on my red pleather couch, watching TV. I made
the requisite phone calls of Holy shit, are you seeing this
too? to stitch my harried voice into the scene.
Then I soon discovered it was dragging on forever.
These people couldn’t get this goddamn statue down.
No matter how hard they pulled, the satisfying iron thud
and confetti spray of sand eluded them.
Jesus Christ, I said. I have a life too, you know,
and I started washing dishes and tidying the room.
Ho hum, I thought, then laughed. Ho hum
to the future paragraph in a sixth grade history textbook,
to the dramatic photo caption that reads
“The Fall of an Empire” or alternatively,
“The Dawn of a New Era,” depending on the years
that follow this drawn-out day; ho hum
to the rare child who absorbs all that content,
heavily edited for young eyes, and to the kid
who rips out the page to construct a paper airplane,
a black ballpoint moustache already smeared.



Nicole Steinberg  is the Co-Editor of LIT and Associate Editor of BOMB magazine. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Gulf Coast, McSweeney's Internet Tendency, RealPoetik, Barrelhouse, and elsewhere. She curates and hosts EARSHOT, a reading series for emerging writers in Brooklyn, New York.