American Mantra
By Chris Bullard
Nov 15, 2025
Nov 15, 2025
Front row, fourth grade, my ribs press against my oak desk’s enveloping writing arm as I try to memorize Bolivia’s principle exports: zinc, tin, soybeans and natural gas, items of commercial exchange between my country and a nation I don’t know. I’ve just about gotten them all in my head when I see everyone looking to the last row of seats, a place of exile, a classroom Siberia with spitballs as its only product. Norman is ripping out clumps of his black hair, flinging them to the floor like he does with his tests. Some kids are laughing. Some have jumped from their seats. “So gross,” one girl cries. I send my eyes forward to the blackboard, so I don’t have to see the crater he’s excavated from his crown. Copper-scented blood settles on the rim of his ear like snow on the Andes. When the principal escorts Norman from class, I blank out his deportation by whispering “zinc, tin, soybeans and natural gas,” a mantra I employ when I encounter unpleasant events. Ticking off this list of resources, this litany of things that we trade for, I can forget the men shouting on the streets, the news about starvation. “Zinc, tin, soybeans and natural gas,” I mumble and walk until I’m back somewhere familiar.
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Chris Bullard lives in Philadelphia, PA. In 2022, Main Street Rag published his poetry chapbook, Florida Man, and Moonstone Press published his poetry chapbook, The Rainclouds of y. Finishing Line Press published his chapbook, Lungs, in April and his work appeared in Keystone: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, this May.
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Author’s Note:
If you’d asked me two years ago whether I was an optimist or a pessimist, I’d have said I was neutral. I never felt particularly low, but I also never felt truly happy. This piece is about realising I hadn’t lost happiness; I’d just forgotten how to feel it.
I wrote it on a bus in February. It was probably grey and miserable, like England tends to be at the tail end of winter, but I was happy. I’d just signed a lease on the perfect flat in a dreamy location. The man I’d been seeing for six weeks and was already in love with, had offered to help me move. For the first time in years, I felt like my life was becoming mine again.