All-American

I’m this tiny, this statuesque, and everywhere in between, and everywhere in between bony and overweight, my shadow cannot hold one shape in Omaha, in Tuscaloosa, in Aberdeen. My skin is mocha brown, two shades darker than taupe, your question is racist, nutmeg, beige, I’m not offended by your question at all. Penis or vagina? Yes and yes. Gay or straight? Both boxes. Bi, not bi, who cares, stop fixating on my sex life, Jesus never leveled his eye to a bedroom’s keyhole. I go to church in Tempe, in Waco, the one with the exquisite stained glass, the one with a white spire like the tip of a Klansman’s hood. Churches creep me out, I never step inside one, never utter hymns, Sundays I hide my flesh with camouflage and hunt. I don’t hunt but wish every deer wore a bulletproof vest and fired back. It’s cinnamon, my skin, it’s more sandstone than any color I know. I voted for Obama, McCain, Nader, I was too apathetic to vote, too lazy to walk one block, two blocks to the voting booth For or against a women’s right to choose? Yes, for and against. For waterboarding, for strapping detainees with snorkels and diving masks. Against burning fossil fuels, let’s punish all those smokestacks for eating the ozone, bring the wrecking balls, but build more smokestacks, we need jobs here in Harrisburg, here in Kalamazoo. Against gun control, for cotton bullets, for constructing a better fence along the border, let’s raise concrete toward the sky, why does it need all that space to begin with? For creating holes in the fence, adding ladders, they’re not here to steal work from us, no one dreams of crab walking for hours across a lettuce field so someone could order the Caesar salad. No one dreams of sliding a squeegee down the cloud-mirrored windows of a high-rise, but some of us do it. Some of us sell flowers. Some of us cut hair. Some of us carefully steer a mower around the cemetery grounds. Some of us paint houses. Some of us monitor the power grid. Some of us ring you up while some of us crisscross a parking lot to gather the shopping carts into one long, rolling, clamorous and glittering backbone.