Make America Literal Again
By Krista Cox
Selected by Guest Editor Joobin Bekhrad
There’s this guy on the TV everywhere
I go these days. His voice grates on me like
parmesan on a Caesar, but not the
green plastic cylindrical kind that Mom
always bought. I wonder if she knows there’s
something more than powder? Anyway,
this guy, this time, was going on and on
about some woman asking questions, how
she wasn’t supposed to be, how they’re not
ever supposed to be. No right to be,
really. To prove his point, a follower—
or maybe they’re acolytes, lighting
tiny effigies of diversity
and incensing the hell out of them—
groped a girl, literally a girl, teen
breasts in livid hands, and then he pepper
sprayed her face. This is not news.
These are the walls that built a nation where
we all sit with legs dangling while we eat
a sack lunch and hope this time Mom could afford
provolone instead of Kraft singles. She
was never groped for what she believed in,
just for what others believed their due.
It’s the same old story, rebooted for a
new generation: make America
America again, but this time, lose
the symbolism and let the weary
build walls out of their disconnect notices.
Bio: Krista Cox is a paralegal, an associate poetry editor at Stirring: A Literary Collection, and the Program Director of Lit Literary Collective, a non-profit dedicated to serving her local literary community. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Antiphon, Whale Road Review, and Pittsburgh Poetry Review, among other places. Find her work and more about her at http://kristacox.me.
