Minority Report by Elizabeth Knapp

Minority Report
 
Imagine an alternate future
in which Tom Cruise
 
is elected president.
I’m not saying
 
it could really happen,
but imagine a future
 
in which the state
is one gigantic eyeball
 
that never blinks.
In this perversion
 
of Emersonian
Transcendentalism,
 
the group mind is such
that any deviation
 
is treated with the utmost
suspicion. Thus,
 
anyone who uses thus
in a poem will be summarily
 
executed. I’m not saying
it’s going to happen,
 
but sooner or later,
somebody somewhere
 
is going to blow himself up.

Elizabeth Knapp

Elizabeth Knapp is the author of The Spite House (C&R Press, 2011), winner of the 2010 De Novo Poetry Prize. The recipient of the 2015 Literal Latté Poetry Award and the 2007 Discovered Voices Award from Iron Horse Literary Review, she has published poems in Best New Poets 2007, The Massachusetts Review, Mid-American Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, and many other journals. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars and a PhD from Western Michigan University and is currently Associate Professor of English at Hood College in Frederick, Maryland.