“I pledge obedience
to the Divided States of America;
one ethnic nation,
under child sex-trafficking rings,
[redacted]
with massacre
and
forced births
for all.

I bow my head
to the camps
built for the lesser of us—
the immigrants and the women,
who labor for us, or go into labor for us,
who prepare feasts for the tallest of us,
while flags are raised higher
than the mass grave
on which I stand.

I mourn in ignorance,
eat without knowledge,
and sit at tables Christ Himself
would have overturned with rage.”

Doesn’t that sound insane?
Ignorant?

I watch the time go by.
Hours stack on hours
as I stare into my screen,
scrolling, reading, scouring the state
for any evidence of a soul.
There is none.

There are only photographs
of little girls duct-taped to tables.
There are only tips dismissed as sensationalized rumors.
There are only videos of my neighbors
wrestled to the ground
before a magazine of bullets
is emptied into their bodies
like the gun
had a point to prove.

It did.

I read the testaments of the victims.
I watch the riots break out.
I can’t look away.

So I wonder why others can.
Why mouths open to defend
the ungodliest among us—
those who steal,
who kill,
who rape,
who cannibalize
and then
lead
our “great” nation.

America—
the festering wound of the Earth,
so rotten
that indifference is branded as balance,
that witnessing horror
worse than anything fiction dared imagine
and doing
nothing
is sold as the moderate position.

Then yes—
I pray.

I pray that I am a radical.
I pray that the “reasonable” recoil from me.
I pray that my anger is offensive,
unpalatable,
impossible to domesticate.

Let them call me dangerous
for naming the violence.
Let them call me extreme
for refusing to kneel.

This is not a nation.
It is a crime scene.

I will not be civil.

I will not watch as my daughter, one day,
dares to dream
and is met by men
who promise futures
they intend to take—
who touch her
as if she were created
for their pleasure’s sake.

I will not watch as my son, soon after,
is stripped of himself,
reduced to a body,
handled, processed, then erased.

I will not inherit this world quietly.

I will not keep the cages,
the cover-ups,
the flags stitched with excuses
neatly folded
in their keepsake chest.

I will empty it.