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Michelle Maria Boleyn

Manuscript Contents

 
I SPEAK TO YOU AS AN AMERICAN WOMAN

..........Have you seen America lately?
Blindsided Indian country. Lust.
Red brick buildings trapped
in the dust of apathy and accusation.
Dimly lit cotton fields
dry and blowing in the last winds of freedom gone
through the holes in Geronimo's teeth
on the blood spattered ground of a million
assassinations from Cape Horn to Sitka.
Other holes of disgust sing the wind song of defeat
throughout Detroit's smashed factories
and tenements. Jobless souls curse the unknown
and look outwards to Europe, asking
why? Where did the dream go wrong?
So much freedom drowning in the glitter
of Holly wood shopping malls, while Disney grins
a Mickey Mouse smile
and grabs the money out
of children's hands, wild ride children, wishing
for a cyberspace never to be found.
..........Have you seen America lately?
Gone into the desert, coyotes running wild through
the endless summer of Los Angeles disasters.
Starlets still shaking and jiggling in
from somewhere in Nacadoches, or Pruitt, or Niles,
finding empty lives in a land
where freedom isn't free and challenge
is the latest software program.
..........My father's mother came from San Carlos,
ARIZONA.
Apache and Yaqui, her mother was raped in a raid,
Yaqui on Apache, sifting the dust of Chijuajua
through her legs.
No Indian wants a half-breed Indian,
no white man wants an Indian half-breed child.
Europe came in like a Scottish gamekeeper,
hitting a ball across the landscape,
until the landscape was finished in cement and coins
and half-breeds were left to the desert sky.
Coyotes know.
..........Have you seen America lately?
No one ever told my grandmother or Pancho Villa
that they could not cross the Rio Grande.
Now, the Rio Grande is polluted with chemistry
and intestines of migration, running into the debris
of America's ruined cities. Bad faith tenements
housing travelers, money laden boilermakers,
pouring oil into the fray. Gamekeepers.
Population eliminators
cheering for guns and cocks in the streets
and fires and floods and disease,
business makers psyching the
movement, playing cards with lives.
Women are dying in Juarez.
..........I speak to you as an American woman,
half of one and half of the other.
I tell you the game is finished
The stones of Utah have won. Stay where you are.
There is no more "America", only Atzlan,
or somewhere
and the saints of San Carlos, Arizona.
© Michelle Marie Boleyn

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