In America, by Levi Rogers

In America,
 
You can only be one thing:
One color. One religion. One sex. One body type.
One hair color.
So say the Reality TV actors and producers that
currently run “America”
and have always run “America: The Greatest
Public Relations Campaign in Existence,”
to mask a shadier form of being.
 
America, I would call you the whore of Babylon
except I don’t think you’d even allow a woman
to hold that position of power
in your big swingin pale dick United States of
America.
 
America, did you never think
there would be consequences?
Did the founders pay lip service
to all, when they really meant one type
of America (n)?
Or did they truly mean All?
All skin colors and religions and shapes of feet and
tonsils
Have we just recently fucked it all the way to
oblivion?
Or has it always been so?
Have these United states ever been united?
 
In America we believe in Christianity even though
we don’t believe in the teachings of the blue-eyed
Norwegian whose paintings we hang on our walls.
 
America, you reap what you sow and yet You
continue to sow the same seeds
of
death
and
murder
and
guns
and I
don’t
underst
and it.
 
Go back to your land of potatoes, back to Kenya
where you were born,
Excuse me: you are a brown Muslim woman? A
Congresswoman!
What do you mean guns should have limits?
 
We had never imagined this in America and
because we never imagined it…
We fear it. The women from Minnesota and
Queens most of all.
 
I have lived in America all my life and I still cannot
explain America to you probably because we
cannot agree on a common America.
 
Oh! the boredom, the failings, the trappings, the
poor, the weak, the scared, the limits,
of the white imagination. 

Levi has an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Antioch University Los Angeles and has a Bachelor of English from the University of Utah. He served on Antioch University’s literary journal, Lunch Ticket, as an associate editor for the Diana Woods Memorial Prize in Creative Nonfiction. He runs a coffee roasting company by day and lives in Salt Lake City with his wife Cat, his dog Amelie, and his socks, all of which have holes. ​