If Someday Called
The world feels hard right now. I wrote this poem after reading about the stabbing last week on a Portland train.
The young man hates everything America could become
On the train, his eyes scan for defiance, located
In the skin she could not choose
In the faith that was her birthright
In his America, they are MRSA, hiding in plain sight
He howls before them, an incubus of piss and sangria.
They clasp their brown hands together like rattan.
As a child, she was scared by the neighbor dog
Barking and lunging and growling
And her daddy told her, stare straight ahead and keep walking
“Don’t show ’em your fear, they can smell it”
She stares down at the dirty floor, begs her legs not to shake.
For three men on the train, this scene was not their America
A pizza-slinging student poet, an idealist in his first white-collar job
And a 53-year-old Iraq and Afghanistan vet named Rick Best
Who dies on an unexpected battlefield
Not Fallujah or Kamdesh, but “Portland City Transit”
By a backyard terrorist, homegrown as moonshine
(It’s free speech even if he smells like USS Jihad)
I keep thinking about Rick and his close-cropped hair.
His America, just a few stops up the way in Happy Valley.
When the young man’s knife tears apart his throat,
He thinks, My wife, my babies.
His son says: “He died fighting the good fight.”
Who knew it would be this close to home.
This is 2017 in our America.
I am afraid of the bus. I am afraid of the train.
In the park and theater and terminal, I search for escape routes.
Now I wonder if it’s the day it all rips apart about me
School shooter. Truck bomb. Lockdown. Manchester.
I am most scared of the white man with the gun
He doesn’t want my money.
He will not stop.
I wonder who I will be that day
I pretend it’s in everyone’s interest to keep my seat
I asked Will what he will do if I die suddenly
And he won’t answer — why tempt fate?
My puppy drapes her fat little body over my legs every night
And dozes peacefully. (Her America is all bones and bellyrubs.)
My mother. She will sob herself to sleep.
But when the doors slam shut and the light turns green
And we’re alone on the train with the white man
And the gun and the knife and the bomb
There are more like me waiting in the street
To hold my mother’s wrinkled hand
To pour Will another drink
And sing silly songs to my puppy as she snores.
In this America, must I become ready to measure out my life
For what is even more precious and rare than waking?
The courage to stare down the dog
To grab the knife
To stand tall as a statue
And stop my shaking
If someday called.
Because my body as a shield is more rare than my heart
Which beats in all us lovers, in the America of ever.
