by Stacia M Fleegal
We are three hundred and thirty-six years old,
I want to say, but only the wake of your story
would hear because the girl is long gone who
said the thing that, as you relay it now,
tires me with ache—I literally want
to lie down and wake up draped in rainbows
and see the girl and hear her say Color,
can you see me? But instead, she said
I can't vote for him because he is black.
She actually used the word can't. I can't
fathom hate while sitting next to you, love,
or her nonchalance as she walked away.
Earlier, you said he's like Kennedy.
Neither is a good thing. Neither means we're free.
Stacia M Fleegal's first collection of poems, Anatomy of a Shape-Shifter, is forthcoming in 2010 by WordTech. She is a graduate of Spalding University's brief-residency MFA in Writing program. Finishing Line Press recently released a chapbook of her poems, A Fling with the Ground. Individual poems have appeared in many journals, most recently Comstock Review, Minnetonka Review, 42opus, White Pelican Review, and Elsewhere, and are forthcoming in Inkwell, Valparaiso Poetry Review, Here and There, and Women. Period.: Women Writing About Menstruation (Spinsters Ink Press, 2008). In 2006, her poetry won first place in the graduate division of the Kentuckiana Metroversity Writing Competition and placed as a special merit finalist in Comstock Review's Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award in Poetry contest. She is co-founder and managing editor of the online literary journal Blood Lotus, a poetry editor for New Sins Press, and the coordinator of the journals department at the University of Nebraska Press.
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