Friday, June 12, 2020

WHAT WHITE PEOPLE STEAL: AN (INCOMPLETE) SURVEY

by Sarah Haufrect


Trump administration won’t say who got $511 billion in taxpayer-backed coronavirus loans —The Washington Post, June 11, 2020


Home base
Soundbites
Roman antiquities
Registered handguns
Textbooks about history
Rx drugs from the bathroom cabinet
Extra sample-sized cups of self-serve frozen yogurt
Bitcoin
Borders
Jury selections
Boards of directors
Acceptance letters to elite universities
Higher scores on their kids’ SATs
Streaming television services
National elections
Little packets of Splenda from the coffee kiosk
Years off their ages with fillers and Botox
Intellectual property
Internet porn
Venture capital
Overpriced gourmet popcorn
Foreign passports
Someone else’s taxi
Personal identities
Supreme courts
Nuclear arsenals
Corn subsidies
Workers risking their lives to feed their families
Presidential pardons
Computer algorithms
Jewelry at Nordstrom
Detroit techno
Rap
(Never crack)
Always cocaine
Copyrights
Indigenous land
Basic civil and human rights
Living wages
Immigrant children still locked up in cages
Bars and dance clubs alive with innocent bystanders
Black lives that matter that matter that matter


Sarah Haufrect is a 2020 graduate of the MFA Writing program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. Her poems have been featured or are forthcoming in the Berkeley Poetry Review, Medusa's Laugh Press, Lucky Jefferson, and others.