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. 

"All-American" from Dear, Sincerely, by David Hernandez