/three girls passed Ranger School last year/
for Winnie Wardlaw
My parents were post-racial so we were Unitarian
and never ate fried chicken, only Duck à L’orange.
If our cat’s kittens weren’t perfect, mother fed them
to our pet python who preferred hamsters with less
hair. Hamsters are capable of love but not if they’re
forced to struggle upside down since all their energy
(E) is lost flailing to find a hard surface. Don’t touch
my mother’s Steuben® vase engraved with Castro’s
face, as if she cared. She cared enough to buy me a
pair of combat boots from military supply and to serve
canned rations whenever a friend slept over, especially,
Winnie, whose mother baked macaroons which I hate
to this day though Mrs. Wardlaw was nice enough, no
doubt suspicious that my mother preferred Lumumba
to Castro since I went to Vermont for survival training,
and three girls passed Ranger School last year. I have
the satisfaction of knowing that Winnie never goes
winter camping or shoots a deer between his eyes or
wears cargo pants to cocktail parties or reads The Prison
Notebooks to her child or feeds ugly kittens to her
pets. OK, stop bragging, get back to work.
Clara B. Jones is a retired scientist, currently practicing poetry in Asheville, NC. As a woman of color, Clara writes about the “performance” of identity and power, and she conducts research on experimental poetry. Her poems, reviews, essays, and interviews have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous venues.
