Lawrence Hall
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Dispatches for the Colonial Office

                            Your Poetry's Background Check

          And above all, who is in power in that part of the country,
          or, rather, who will be by the time we get there?

                                  -Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago

We don’t suffer a Soviet Writers’ Union
Except that we do – and what are you up to?
Have you written an ordinary adjective
That will be forbidden in a future place?
                    You sound suspiciously colonialist

Last year DEI was mandatory
This year it will be a forbidden scheme
What guidelines for little magazines
Will be cleansed in the New Order to come?
                    Harriet Monroe is a non-person now

Who will be in charge of your poetry and your life
Whenever you don’t get to wherever it was
                    that you were going?