I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown.

I'm Major Jackson and this is the slowdown. When they were young, I would ask my children which social cause they wish to donate to.

During Thanksgiving, I gave them the assignment to research a non-profit they wanted to support. They decided to donate to our local animal

shelter and food bank. Not that we had extra funds, but it felt important to engender a spirit of giving as a counterbalance to the end of the year

emphasis on shopping and spending.

I feared my children as adults would measure their identity and

self-worth by the size of their paycheck and not their heart.

Today's poem disentangles the quest for money, transactional desire, and lyric subjectivity. Its teasing interplay of language brings into close proximity art, social class, and

manners of currency.

Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero Zero

Zero Zero Zero

by Aaron Marie Lynch

I have desired most to be desired.

Last drops of juice squeezed from the lime, husk and thereafter gone my givingness.

Oh, handsome men, I'm sick of them.

The new girlfriends look like me, or I look like the old girlfriends.

Their fathers sell the missiles their grandfathers designed.

Drunk on their wine, I slept warm. designed. funds. Not at all a proper subject for the lyric, my teacher said.

Nothing follows generations like zeros and bank accounts and a resulting politeness concerning origins.

Debt like a lyric situation constrains until having been exited it once again becomes illusory.

The similarities end there.

And yes, I have desired most some money, some money without trying.

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