When you are a crow and you are

forever looking down on people,
do you find you still think highly of them?

Terre Verte

Terre Verte

The ripe red tomato was green first

and will return to green earth

when the pink and red flesh

fades to feed next seasons baskets of fruit.

The Tusquittee Painting Queens

laid down an undercoat of terre verte

to neutralize the red and pink

and make cheeks and hands glow

Hands that cup a butterfly, a hummingbird

Hands that hold a newborn or follow your

lover around the dance floor

Chloe made a warm space

for the Tusquittee Queens to paint and drink tea

To Chloe, from a distance,

you were loved by all.

I stroked her cheek

brushed her hair back from her eyes

I held her hand in mine

as in prayer

and promised her

I would love her the rest of my life

To Chloe, from a distance,

This could be you here

and me there

spread across the green earth.

Prayer from Gray’s River

Prayer from Gray’s River

When a mother kills the light in her son’s eyes
god moves stone like water for miles
and ash rains for months.

I collect mudstone from a bleached river bed
exposed by floods that come
most winters. I build

a cairn on my window sill. If I leave
the cairn sit memories leach
away so sometimes

when I’m strong I take a piece and taste the grit.
The last time I admonished Jack
I can’t recall my words

but under a glaring sun, I see his flushed cheeks,
his sweat-matted hair brushed back. I see
tears as he watches me

instruct him to work harder with the same eyes
that challenged his mother. It’s not like
I’m going to die!

he vowed two nights before she drugged him and
drowned him with a pillow.

The memory is unlithified--I return it
gently--undo only the slightest
flake with my breath.

(previous draft: click here.)

Approaching getting louder

Approaching getting louder

Listening from other rooms

to half answers half heard about school

I close my eyes, think of trees

and husband my fathering opinions.

I can ignore a car backfiring,

the curdling screams of bleeding cats,

the helicopter throbbing overhead,

but news about her hard day

or planned family outings

sends me readying. Listen.

My ringing ears hear gasoline drip

in every mothering voice.

Who is Mike Flynn?

Just kidding. We all know who Mike Flynn is.

In place for fire (v3)

Just go sit in the rubbered uncirculated air

a step or two down from the cold terrazzo landing

where yellow pipes run up the cinder block wall.

Where water smolders behind red valves

with brass gauges ready to erupt throughout

the institution. I don’t go into the cave to hide

from wolves. I go for this: no whirring motors;

no leaking earbuds; no one reciting from their

collected injustices.  I can wait years for the words

sheltered from those thoughts of others.

The Nationalist's Delusion, by Adam Serwer

We are in the middle of a political civil war over our soul--America's soul--on two fronts: racism and sexism. This article in The Atlantic lays out the racism front. (I'd also like to note American isn't alone in this.)

Political and Media elites create other explanations for the 2016 election, because, this one, racism, is too destructive, perhaps even to their own personal esteem.

These supporters will not change their minds, because this is what they always wanted: a president who embodies the rage they feel toward those they hate and fear, while reassuring them that that rage is nothing to be ashamed of.

The specific dissonance of Trumpism—advocacy for discriminatory, even cruel, policies combined with vehement denials that such policies are racially motivated—provides the emotional core of its appeal. It is the most recent manifestation of a contradiction as old as the United States, a society founded by slaveholders on the principle that all men are created equal.

The idea that economic suffering could lead people to support either Trump or Sanders, two candidates with little in common, illustrates the salience of an ideological frame. Suffering alone doesn’t impel such choices; what does is how the causes of such hardship are understood.

Which scapegoat is more attractive: Wall Street and corporate America or that others (minorities, immigrants) are getting help that you deserve?

... what Trump’s supporters refer to as political correctness is largely the result of marginalized communities gaining sufficient political power to project their prerogatives onto society at large. What a society finds offensive is not a function of fact or truth, but of power. It is why unpunished murders of black Americans by agents of the state draw less outrage than black football players’ kneeling for the National Anthem in protest against them. It is no coincidence that Trump himself frequently uses the term to belittle what he sees as unnecessary restrictions on state force.

Birtherism is a synthesis of the prejudice toward blacks, immigrants, and Muslims that swelled on the right during the Obama era: Obama was not merely black but also a foreigner, not just black and foreign but also a secret Muslim. Birtherism was not simply racism, but nationalism—a statement of values and a definition of who belongs in America. By embracing the conspiracy theory of Obama’s faith and foreign birth, Trump was also endorsing a definition of being American that excluded the first black president. Birtherism, and then Trumpism, united all three rising strains of prejudice on the right in opposition to the man who had become the sum of their fears.

In this sense only, the Calamity Thesis is correct. The great cataclysm in white America that led to Donald Trump was the election of Barack Obama.

Abraham Lincoln began the Civil War believing that former slaves would have to be transported to West Africa. Lyndon Johnson began his political career as a segregationist. Both came to realize that the question of black rights in America is not mere identity politics—not a peripheral matter, but the central, existential question of the republic. Nothing is inevitable, people can change. No one is irredeemable. But recognition precedes enlightenment.