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where do we live?

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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.


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