My White Throat
I speak with the mouth of privilege.
My lips frame words that smack of status
unearned; status given by the chance
coloration of my skin, my sex,
and a middle-class childhood during the boom.
It dawned on me one day with the sun-
rise of my wife’s righteous indignation
over my father’s photo in an old
World-War-Two-Korean-War directory
of those who served from Victory, Oklahoma.
Turning to the back of the book, she looked
where my father’s face should be. It wasn’t.
Instead, a sea of black and white: white
pages and black ink and faces and then
the dawning. That’s when the bomb fell on
the kitchen counter, exploding my comfort to bits.
Oh. She said. Oh. Her voice raised
in pitch and intensified. Oh.
Her eyes hardened to stone and her face
flushed red with rage.
She threw the book down in disgust. Disturbed —
no, in anger — that black and white could not
share the same page. Angry that she,
like me, in the world of our paleness truly
never saw the sea in which we swam.
My father was a kind man. I’d like
to think he would weep for all of this —
and perhaps he did (I’ll never know).
All the same, his school was paid: the
VA was more than kind in this regard.
While those relegated to the back
page were denied to quench their thirst
from that same collegiate fountain.
So I was born in privilege.
My father was a pharmacist.
And I received the benefit
of doubt thanks to
my lighter hue of skin.
Now I find the self-same status sticks
to the back of my throat and I choke.
How can I express what I have never
felt: the fear of lights flashing from
behind for no good cause, the lack of choice,
distrustful eyes that stare because of a place
on the back of a page where black and white cannot
exist; where peace and justice cannot kiss?
I do not understand.
I cannot understand.
I confess to you, today, my mouth
is filled with sand the color of which gets caught
deep in the back
of my
white
throat.
To support the poet’s benign coffee addiction: Coffee.
