Rachel Loden - Dick of the Dead

I’ll be writing more soon, on this wonderful new book from Rachel Loden, whose fist book Hotel Imperium delighted me a few years ago. Anyway, if you don’t have that one, go buy it. And if you don’t have this new one, go buy it as well. I’m only five or so pages in, and I just had to put it down and rush to the computer. It’s just wonderful.


Rachel Loden
from Dick of the Dead


MY ANGELS, THEIR PINK WINGS


Who, if I pitched a hissy fit, would even
blink a powdered eyelid

among the angelic orders? The night sky
is indifferent and glittery with facts.

A third millennium giddily
boots up and Lenin, firm and pliant

from his glycerine bath, waits for kisses
in the glass sarcophagus. But I too

wish to call a meeting of the Committee
for the Deathless Beauty

of the Tsar, the standing Congress for
the Recarnation of the President. I too

wish to lie in state inside the Hall
of Pillars, in the echoes of the Capitol

Rotunda, cooing to my tricky
one, crooning to my trembling Republic.