BAND TOGETHER

by Ron Riekki

Print by Alessandra Roth available at Pixels

If you give gifts for the holidays this year,
I hope you’ll consider Kobabe’s Gender Queer,
 
and don’t forget Mike Curato’s Flamer,
because a tradition that I would love to start
 
is equating the holidays with banned books and banned art,
like The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-
 
Time Indian sitting underneath the Christmas tree
alongside The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky—
 
even though it is claimed to be sexually explicit with profanity—
my hope’s for the opposite of Fahrenheit 451
 
where adults have free speech and the children aren’t dumb
and muted and lack understanding of different religions
 
and cultures and worldviews and more.
So please give the gift of George Orwell’s 1984
 
and Feast of the Seaweeds by Haidar Haidar,
and do it before this poem gets banned
 
like North Korea banning The Quran, and Hunan,
China, banning Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
 
Along with the dreidel, matzo, and mistletoe,
I hope your holidays are filled with George by Alex Gino
 
and Nineteen Minutes by Jodi Picoult
and Girl with a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier,
 
because they can’t ban books if we give them away
in the thousands, no, millions, this Christmas Day.

Ron Riekki co-edited Undocumented: Great Lakes Poets Laureate on Social Justice (Michigan State University Press).