Home // November.18.2016 // Maya Ramakrishnan

 

great again

tonight we are taking america back from you people
said the patient to the doctor whose skin looks like mine.

my friend who tells me this story is as white as guilt.
his voice breaks on the phone. and he was born here!

my friend weeps. he does not know that you people is part
of our inheritance, gathering dust in a red rose tea box along with

our grandmother's jewelry. we are steeped in our mothers' you people
accents, and my children and their children will be you people

wherever they are born. dry-eyed and gentle , I try to explain
to my friend, who is, after all, one of the good ones, the stunned ones.

he agrees: it doesn't really matter where the doctor was born.

later, I see a woman on a bicycle stopped at a light. she is also you people.
she looks at me and nods. I nod.

if we were wolves and not women, you would hear the howls.
 

Banner graphic source: In this photo by Evan Guest, Donald Trump is shown at a campaign stop in Muscatine Iowa, 1/24/2016. This image was originally posted to Flickr, and appears here via Wikimedia Commons under the terms of the CC by 2.0 license.

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