Stagflation: stagnant growth, high unemployment, & rising prices, or inflation.

Despite inelastic demand in wartime,
the stags have shredded our hospital tents.
Prices have flapped their dovish wings
to withering heights. In one view, stimulus would fix it—
recruit the bowerbirds to curate bright archival egesta,
everything that’s loved and red: Coke cans,
lipsticked napkin, bloodied antlers needing mending.

New sects from the homefront. Corporate Social Responsibility
and robotic deer trained on “Bambi” looping.
A flock of sheep bleating for an Economy in Blue
(My sweet embraceable ewe); their book club
meets in a pilates gym, the machines like stanchions,
traumatic on the road to trebuchet.

Again the canaries are on strike,
oil-streaked feathers like ink-dipped quills-to-be
in God’s furious letter to his future self.
By lantern they discuss Jane Jaybird Abels’s
appeals to Aerial Sovereignty, theorizing
deficit-spending on care and canine and cloud.

In oak hollows gather the vanguard raccoons,
whose slogans electrify even the smoothest-barked beech
into goosebumps of utopia, a fabulist’s dropcap
in the shape of a leaf. They play on demand (the verb)
and supply (adverb) and nail their fibrous theses
to any beaver dam that’ll glisten. They pun on tender.
They draw graphs in muck explaining inflation
is a matter of resources not budgets—an image
so simple it’s folded into synaptic wallets forestwide,
until each creature thinks to itself, That could be
my face on the currency. The sheep count themselves
and self-shear to own the means of production
and keep the wartime kitty beneath their coats.
They’re loyal to whoever needs them for dreaming.

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Natan Last works in refugee and asylum seeker policy and advocacy. His recent writing can be found in The New Yorker, The Drift, The Atlantic, Narrative, and Los Angeles Review of Books. He writes crossword puzzles for The New Yorker and his nonfiction book about crosswords, Across the Universe, is out this November from Pantheon.