Getting Personal with Dr. Phil | Nadia Kalman

“It’s a pretty high-risk mission.”
Up the steps and past the Christmas wreath
With your new friends, familiar mustache, eager teeth
We seem to be inside of your fan fiction.

The next day you are back on television
Still wearing that windbreaker, you repeat:
ICE showed you all their rap sheets
You’re not about to ask to be forgiven.

Did you ever think you’d end up here
Those times you went on Oprah, talking tough
To teenage moms? You never quite became a star.

Try not to show your fear
when a quiet man in handcuffs
says he knows you from TV.

Nadia Kalman is an NEA Literature grantee who has published one novel (The Cosmopolitans, Livingston Press) and translated work from the poet Regina Derieva for the collection Earthly Lexicon (Marick Press). Several of her poems are forthcoming in the Chiron Review.