A POEM BY DONALD ILLICH



          BLACK HUMOR IN ART


          A man is run down by a car
          while walking
          to his daughter’s dance recital.
          It’s driven
          by his former tap instructor,
          who he’d slept with
          when he was 18.
          The mechanic
          who failed to fix the faulty brakes
          was selling drugs
          to the man’s son,
          who had been planning
          to destroy his father
          with explosives
          stored inside
          his tap shoes.
          That evening the man
          was supposed to have starred
          in a musical based on
          the assassination of President Lincoln.
          The actor playing
          John Wilkes Booth
          was the instructor’s husband,
          had loaded real bullets in his gun.
          The director
          had invited the actual president,
          who he hated,
          and had wired the man’s top hat
          with dynamite
          to go off when he shook hands
          with the politician
          after the show.
          The theater owner
          knew all this,
          chuckled to himself
          in a dark room
          at this black, black jokes.



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Donald Illich has published poems in The Iowa Review, Fourteen Hills, and New Zoo Poetry Review. He has poems forthcoming in several journals,including Passages North, LIT, The Sulphur River Literary Review, Softblow, Eratio, Roanoke Review, CrossConnect Magazine, Xavier Review, and Cold Mountain Review. He works as a writer in Rockville, Maryland


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