Smoky Mountains diner
truckers in stetsons
playing pinball

On the hundred and fifty-third day, having revictualled with ground beef and cola purchased for gold at great expense from the indigenous, we sailed out of the Gulf of Trump through the Trump Straits, leaving the Great Bull of Lago to port, and northward up the Orange Coast, past the sweeping greens and bunkers of the Carolina Riviera to Trump City. The old statue of a woman at the mouth of the Trumpson River mentioned in The Atlantic (now Trump Ocean) Scrolls had been replaced by the Statue of Trump with its inspiring inscription:

Take back your tired, your poor,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
We’re gonna make you pay, for sure!

As for wretched refuse, we were unable to dock on account of vast piles of it, as all the city’s garbage collectors had been fired by Elon the Great, and many of them deported.

Thus far the company has been unable to visit any of the palaces occupied by the President-for-Life, reputedly remarkable if only for their vast size. Travel inland is not without dangers; for despite the removal from the President’s former opponents of the right to bear arms, for the rescinding of which the latter had been clamouring many years, his supporters remain armed to the teeth. There is violent contention concerning whether the new name of the country is to be sourced from baseball or their form of armoured rugby, the President having realised only recently that the old name of the country was not derived from a Spaniard, as many had supposed, but from an Italian who was never even a resident of the States; in either case unacceptably celebrating the Continent of Europe, held to be the source of all the liberal evils that contaminated the immigrant Founding Fathers.

Fifth Avenue
the crowd passes by
a naked man

Keith Evetts

is a retired diplomat and former biologist living by the Thames. He is co-author of Year in Year out (D’une année à l’autre), a bilingual collection of short poetry published in July 2024.

Learn more in the author’s profile at The Haiku Foundation.