#title Civil
#author Flavian Mark Lupinetti
#SORTauthors Flavian Mark Lupinetti;
#date 2025
#source [[https://www.fifthestate.org/archive/416-spring-2025/civil]]
#lang en
#pubdate 2025-07-02
#notes Fifth Estate #416, Spring 2025

My brother Greg the prosecuting attorney advises me to chill

He says the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice

I ask did it bend toward justice for the guy who said that

but he hasn’t a clue who I mean

my clue he harvested those words from a bumper sticker

his rosy perspective hogtied into irrelevance by cobwebs

of complacency constructed half a century ago

.

Greg hasn’t attended the gun shows boasting armories

sufficient for overthrowing a third world country

or a first world one

He hasn’t heard the fact-free propaganda blathered forth

by pseudojournalists accountable only to corporate profits

I would have thought he had some familiarity

with the tsunami of corporate crime

Maybe not

Maybe that would explain his inability to see

how close this empire is coming to collapse

.

Why when we contemplate a future civil war

do we imagine only a rebellion of the right

yahoos in red baseball caps rugby shirts and khaki pants

billionaire-financed police force-equipped

kidnapping a governor or dynamiting a courthouse

What if they simply seize the levers of government

Elections mutate into zombie referendums

All results not preordained overturned

.

What if we face the choice of acquiescence or rebellion

Do we fall to fascism or select secession with

Sacramento or Boston our latter-day Richmond

.

What if this time

the first person to fire

on Fort Sumter

has to be one of us

Flavian Mark Lupinetti, a poet, fiction writer and cardiac surgeon, lives in New Mexico. His poems and stories have appeared in <em>Bellevue Literary Review</em>, <em>Cutthroat</em>, <em>december</em>, <em>Redivider</em>, and <em>ZYZZYVA</em>. Mark’s chapbook “The Pronunciation Part” will be published by The Poetry Box in 2025.