My five-year-old niece asks me where we live, and I tell her
that we live in a land where America is the punchline
of some God’s joke that half of us are busy debating
the existence of, while the other half of us are holding
our Bibles like they’re grenades that we can lob at
anyone who doesn’t agree with our opinions.
I tell her we’re still busy digging through the mine rocks
of our subconscious for some hope of gold,
while on the other end of the world there are tribes of people
who are happy just to have charcoal to eat for dinner.
We live in a world, I tell her, where streets are filled
with the bodies of people who work harder trying to find
a place to live than the people with $5 million paychecks,
and those bodies get stepped over like doorsteps just the same.
Where “soup kitchen" is a synonym for “system failure,"
where sometimes the pops of firecrackers and gunshots
are indistinguishable. Here in America, I say, we wear
those pops like bling rings on our index and middle fingers,
and we flip the middle one at anyone who dares to suggest
that handling a gun like a solution is actually the thing
that creates the problem in the first place.
My five-year-old niece wants to know about how come
we tighten our coats and purses closer to our bodies
whenever we pass someone of a different color on the street,
and I tell her that in America, we only trust the people
who’ve got the same color of a mood ring as we do.
We live in a place, I tell her, where the system has failed
but then again, the system wasn’t very much
of a system in the first place.
