Five Poems About Carrie Nation – Sebastian Hunter

January 16, 2026

Her mother at times had delusions
At the Manservant’s Ball
under the fresh sign of Roger
You can tell I’m thinking like mad here
around actually erotic marines
My ass is writing the checks
Unrestrained criminal intent, etc.
Hordes leave the villages and flee to the universe
for tears to irrigate Carrie Nation

Well, brothers, we don our blue jeans
to pop against the landscape
I paid my taxes in a figurative sense
Trickle-down therapy
on her skin was the smokelike
presence of Carrie Nation
Violence on the brain in Ohio
when someone hits the blunt alone
Shepherdesses or their several offerings
Because you can’t trust the mayor with the gridiron
at an eternal 28
even if he still rises with that sun

The colorless occasion of
reading pop history while hungry
And something crackles through the air
Carrie Nation aka Orajel
on the pink plane of your dreams
Who wouldn’t love to disinter those vanities
A partisan Catholic in the vacuum of an LLC
fled while bleeding
like merchants on the block when floodwaters
finally strike a blue streak
Margins of love dissolve
Maybe it’s tomorrow when it’s mine

But that’s where my turn-of-the-century gonads won’t go
still hot off the sipping cider
It behooves you, dear, to shower
Waking at night to the pale spectre of Carrie Nation
Or was it only her twin?
Have I yet to be invented?
Names in their original languages, wheat strewn
across the fields
Farmers bark at their sky when the sun disappears

Smiling to myself within the deer blind
hands folded like a nun
I watch my sports without understanding
Dew of any morning, situation normal
You’re gonna need that ark when you build it
Pastures of presalted meat
and a bed big enough for the Four Policemen
stuffing their egos into the chorus, could give a fuck
Call it “wanting” when I call
but don’t call it Carrie Nation