WHITE MAN'S BLUES

by James McKee

Musician and Trump supporter Kraig Moss sings and plays his guitar as South Carolina voters line —WNYC

Well I’m walking down the street,
There’s no English to be heard;
Yeah, I’m walking down my street,
Ain’t no English, not one word.
I was born in the First World;
Looks like I’ll be buried in the Third.


First they take away your job,
Send the factory off to Mexico;
Then they go after your woman;
Where she’s got to, I ain’t know;
Now they’re coming for what’s left,
Time for another Alamo.


I hear them say white man
With that look on they face;
Everybody saying white man
Like it have some nasty taste;
Seems like they forget
Who it was built this place.


Our daddies had it good,
Everybody knew God was white;
Our daddies kept it simple,
You were black if you weren’t white;
If that means they done wrong,
I got no use for doing right.


Prisons are full and getting fuller,
Because the law is the law.
How come we got so many prisons?
And who is it makes up the law?
Ask too many questions,
You find out what prison’s for.


In New York they call me racist,
Mock my accent and my state;
To L.A. I’m just a redneck,
Love two things, guns and hate;
But I’m the first to get a call
When there’s a war that can’t wait.


Had a dream last night:
A river of strangers rushing by;
No one hears me or sees me,
And then that flood, it runs dry.
I knew when I woke up
Nothing changes till I die.

James McKee and his wife live in New York City, in a neighborhood where the 1% seldom go.  A New Yorker by birth (and likely by death), he enjoys failing in his dogged attempts to keep pace with the unrelenting cultural onslaught of late-imperial Manhattan.  After taking a degree in English & Philosophy, he held a number of ludicrously unsuitable jobs before spending over a decade as a teacher and administrator at a small special-needs high school. His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Raintown Review, Saranac Review, The South Carolina Review, THINK, Mobius, The Road Not Taken, The Worcester Review, The Lyric, The Rotary Dial, and elsewhere; one of his poems recently won the Sow’s Ear Review Poetry Contest, another is a finalist for the Dana Award for Poetry, and a third has been nominated for this year’s Pushcart Prize. He currently works as a private tutor and spends his free time, when not writing or reading, traveling less than he would like and brooding more than he can help.

ELECTION CANVASSING IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, 2012

by Mary Dingee Fillmore

Illustration by Christiane Engel

The woman who never votes
cracks the door.  Her grimy trailer stinks
of smoke and despair.  She says no,
the election’s nothing to do with her,
as she shoves her kids behind her, swats
at the dog.  I can’t persuade her.

Walking down her rotting steps, I go on
driving the streets, knocking on doors, not
for him, the President, likeable and whole
but for her, her young face already sagging.
I have to stop a white man burdened
with too many Cadillacs, whose every meal
is cooked by a woman, who hasn’t ironed
a shirt for decades. To stop him now
from clawing away the last of her few
rights, the right to whatever’s left
of her beautiful, human body
so like mine.


Mary Dingee Fillmore is a poet and novelist who writes about the Holocaust and Resistance in the Netherlands among other subjects.  Her work has been published here, the Atlanta Review, Slant, Upstreet, Pearl, Diner, Westview, Main Street Rag, Pinyon and Blueline.  In her spare time, she helps nonprofit organizations decide what to do and why, and has had her own business, Changing Work, since 1982.