in my mind overrated white woman
ex-Olympic swimmer most recently swam from Cuba to Florida
privileged
thrill seeker
daredevil
doing voluntarily what so many POC
are forced to do while attempting to gain freedom
drowning in boats, falling overboard, terrible accidents,
falling into the jaws of sharks, those waters a meat fest
for predators, slavers.
Sometimes I think about slavery and think if only those waters
could tell the tale
I’ve always wanted to say to those people who go on the reality show
Survivor for kicks
try being an artist and make it your career choice
or how about a single mother or father trying to raise a family
on minimum wage living in an impoverished area
try being someone who comes to America and
doesn’t speak the language whose entire survival rests upon
learning English
arriving in a strange land, on strange soil, estranged from everything
you have ever known
like hitting your head against a glass door, or mirrors
like optical illusions that used to be in the old fun houses
or how about being uninsured and being sick for a number
of years
weathering that storm
or insured but burdened with a costly illness
health plans don’t cover
or like so many of my students who are bullied to the point
they have nowhere to turn and no longer have knowledge
of their own name.
No I never liked Diana Nyad
until one day I caught a clip of her on Ellen
I caught the part where she talked about her friendship
with Superman Christopher Reeve who in real life suffered
paralysis from the neck down.
He looked at her in later years after she’d retired from swimming
said he feared she wasn’t living her own dreams, that
she was an Olympian
And something about her conversations with him motivated her
to try again, to listen.
Maybe through her I saw the frayed ends of my own unlived dreams,
my own fear that caused paralysis
And so by the end of that conversation with Ellen
where Diana talked about returning to her Olympic self
by swimming from Cuba to Florida at age sixty challenging
every notion of what it means to be an athlete, a woman,
and the stereotypes of aging I was crying
by the time she looked into the camera and said
Don’t give up
Never give up your dreams.
CITIZEN
A friend and I were talking after Trump’s election
She remarked in the words of MLK, “There are really two Americas.”
In response, I say, “There are probably seven, eight, nine, ten, twenty Americas, more than we can count.”
I know that during the early ’90s during the early AIDS crisis, I saw another America
As Hilton Als says, when the bodies of dead gay men felled by AIDS
were being tossed out into the streets in garbage bags.
I had many friends who were sick.
I asked one guy, “What took so long with Medicare, why all the red tape?”
He said, “They are just waiting to see if I die first.”
It felt as if someone dropped ice water on me
I was so shocked
But I remember the yellow green brown walls of Bellevue and St. Vincent’s Hospital
wards full of sick skinny gay men
covered in lesions and purple spots like in leper colonies
In my recent experiences with the healthcare system
I was kept in the front offices of a doctor’s office until I explained
I had fancy insurance
“Oh, why didn’t you say so,” he said.
Then I was led to a spare office in the back with a black leather couch
He pulled out a contract and was smiling so nice
So many times, I was sent to specialists who knew nothing
Once I gave my mother a computer, it broke somehow
and my dad not wanting to admit he knew nothing put the wires in
an impossible place.
I laughed, until I learned doctors do it, too.
Back in the day poet Hattie Gossett used to talk about the difference between
snow in Harlem and snow on the Upper East Side
Whereas in Harlem it wasn’t plowed and left in icy mounds
Turned black with soot, urine, and feces
When I graduated college and first began my teaching career
I worked at a literacy center in Harlem attached to a public elementary school
It was there I saw two Americas
Whereas like in South Africa under apartheid
Black students were given Bantu education
forced to speak Afrikaans
I read a headline in a newspaper the other day that called
an opiod epidemic in a white American town heartbreaking
They didn’t say the word heroin until much later and it said heartbreaking
Whereas I remember the crack epidemic in inner city Black neighborhoods
Some of which was planted to destroy them, and the people were called thugs,
addicts, menaces, thrown off welfare rolls
The war on drugs which is now admittedly a code for
the war against Black people
Rockefeller drug laws were invented to put immense numbers of POC
in jail for limited possession.
They got immeasurably long sentences and it was called anything but heartbreaking.
Given all that I have said
What if I told you that little smiley yellow emoticons
That all the texting and social media addicts use
are just masks
What if beneath them were war, savagery, rage, poverty, fear,
jealousy, envy, people fighting and
desperate to survive
After Trump was elected people on the left kept claiming
He’s stolen our democracy
I would never dispute his evil and our world is forever changed
But I have to ask
Exactly what democracy is it we are speaking of?
Is it the one of slavery and subsequent 100 years of Jim Crow?
Is it the slaughter of Native American people
Treaties broken like today’s voting machines in poor and Black neighborhoods?
Is it Standing Rock where a pipeline is driven through sacred Native lands,
People tear gassed arrested?
Is it the recent ICE detention centers, Brown people held for seeking asylum
and put in cages?
The millennium started with Bush’s stolen election
Which democracy is it we are speaking of?
Is it the one that started relentless never-ending wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
With thousands of casualties?
Is it the democracy that dropped Napalm on people running
Skin burnt off
Is it the one where a woman was assaulted daily
dragged across the world stage
and her perpetrator became the leader of a supposedly free world?
What if I said after Trump’s election
A veil lifted
And all we’ve lost are illusions
I don’t know about Obama, but the only hope I have
is in two moments—
When he entered office, he carried a book of poetry
