Revised from 8/28/2020.

In first light I see
the black cat waiting for her food
below her perch in the kitchen window.

“Jump up, beautiful girl — you
can do it!”

She leaps up light,
lands heavy, settles in
to treats and wet food. The calico
does the same for her bowl across the room;
they are, for the moment, content.

I allow myself a weak smile
before I start the coffee,
before the scent fills the kitchen,
before I look out the front windows,
before I take a breath
of the Stench out there
and ask the daily questions:

dare I turn on the television,
open my mail, think of how things
might be getting better or worse?
Dare I count the dead? Dare I count
sneers and curses? Dare I measure or note
the indifference of the alleged good majority
and call them out as the source of this smell?

It’s taken me far too long to call this as I sense this:
that it is not behavior seen or anger heard
nearly as much as it is an odor that chokes me,
makes everything taste less healthy;
odor so thick it coats my skin,
distorts my touch; a pale Stench
from a host of dark graves;
blood so soaked into our soil
that it stains every foundation
and leaks into the roots
of every tree and blade of grass.

In spite of how I choke upon the Stench
the cats seem to ignore it, are purring and happy,
falling back to sleep in their favorite spots
before I pour my first cup of coffee. I suck it down
and here I am again, wondering if today is the day
that I will suffocate at last.

One cat sneezes. I look up to see
the calico stretching. She wheezes a bit.
Might be the Stench,
might be simpler than that.

I’m sure it’s simpler than that.

My love is still asleep still in the next room.
All I want is for her to live through this
and thrive again, breathe clean again.
For myself? All I ask
is that I live long enough
to help clear the air.

Birds don’t sing
for freedom they already have.

Birds sing
for what they desire.

Imprison someone long enough
and they will learn to sing.

Prisoners who can hear birds
will offer cage songs in response.

Any prisoner who learns
how to sing cage songs

will eventually learn
how to make them beautiful.

The warden wants to keep them
from being free.

They will take
the cage songs from the singers,

sell them to the world,
call them freedom songs.

All those freedom songs began
as cage songs rising

in the throats of those
who have been locked down.

Listen to them, the warden says.
Listen to them singing like birds.

The warden might be telling the truth
but you would have to ask a prisoner

to be certain, and no one
wants that to happen. After all

your own chains
might be at risk.

You might feel
a powerful need to sing.

Most mornings —
hell, every morning —

are for staring straight up
at those dots
stuck like pinholes
into the clouds, dots
growing larger against
the once-blessed sky.

Waiting all day
and long into the night,
shielding ourselves from
them —

all those shoes
dropping.

That was never a border
until Someone made it one
in your name whether you cared
or not. Once it was there
you were expected to agree
with it and with all that it took
to keep it a border, from a wall
to a law. You were expected to be
fine with how those coming this way
were kept out, no matter how badly
the starved or sickened or died of thirst
or bullets. You were expected to forget
about their children and those cages and
those tinfoil blankets and how illness took them
and takes them and how Someone
takes them and trades them out
to terror homes and no one will find them
but they get to stay here since they’ve vanished
already and for Someone that counts as compassion
even as they call bottles of water left for future crossers
on this side of that made-up line
a form of treason. You are expected to forget
all Someone did there in favor of new outrages
upon which to focus your outlaw compassion —
but, do not forget. Do not forget that
Someone started there and
what you see there will be done over and over
here there and everywhere until you are unable
to focus and you surrender just as Someone
is waiting for you to do.

Not again:

obvious lie,
the words alone
a weak response
to the moment.

Of course it’s about
to happen again.

I am tired 
of saying it.

I’ve been so tied
to repeating those words
for so long
that my hand
has gone dead
for much beyond 
cutting sad food and 
trembling.

Any magic
that would work now
will have to move 
beyond chanting.

Silver bullets.
Sacred daggers.

An army raised
in the land of
vengeful dead.

out in the streets —
massed like bristles
in a new broom

an urgent cleansing
in progress —
shaking off dust

chanting —
sound of layers of filth
beginning to shift

what was built from dirt
cannot stand —
new broom wrecking all

Tune in twenty-four
seven for the melody
of the moment. Explosions

and big deaths,
laws broken and hard weather
all get sung the same.

The newsreaders sing
the cadence of sport, sing
like play by play reporters.

They throw it to the sidelines 
where generically handsome people
add touches of color to

their black and white
depictions of struggle
made simple and easy to

swallow. Every
story reduced
to winning and losing,

even if all there is
is loss. There is rarely
any story where

all are winning. That’s
not American enough.
Can’t be number one

without there being
a number two. They sing
that song in spite of

the fire behind them:
lullaby, fight song
for the last quarter.

Enough to make you turn it off
and go wail in a corner
waiting for silence to take over

and make you forget.
Make you want to stop caring
for any of it. Almost

as if 
that was the plan from
the starting gun.

I wear the name
“American”
by default only.

It’s not a name
that feels like
a good fit, but in truth

that ill-fit feeling
is as American
an experience

as feeling snug and comfy
when you put the name on.
In fact

the entirety
of American experience
is the history of 

the party of the Snug and Comfy
telling the party of
the Ill-Fitting Name

that one name
fits everyone when in truth
the party of the first part

is only snug and comfy
because the party of the second part
has been made uncomfortable,

and of the discomforted
striving to make the name
fit them as well

when in truth
it wasn’t made
to do that.

I call myself
American 
by default

but I keep trying
for a better fit and 
I see all my fellow

uncomfortable
Americans pushing 
the seams and taking in

the loose fabric
because it’s either do this,
keep living lives of noisy

desperation, or
die of exposure — but  
since that’s what 

the snug and comfy live for,
I swear by the bodies
of all who went before and

will come after, as well as
those here now,
that whatever it takes

to make it so, 
they cannot win and this suit
is going to fit.