This Sort of Haibun
This is why they sang Dixie.
This is what they meant when they said “the south will rise again.” That white supremacy would again find its way into the corridors of power, where the mere suggestion that a lack of pigmentation would be a sure sign of the favor of the angry father who lives in the sky, because why wouldn’t God be just like the people who want to rape and pillage the people who look different than what the pig-mentally challenged favored children of an angry sky father look like?
This is what they meant when they cried “never again” but they left out the part of “never again to us when someone else can be holocausted,” never again will we think about a two state solution, never again will we think about a two party system when a binary cannot stand where the center does not hold because one half of the house has decided to spend all their time masturbating to kiddie porn, while making sure the other guys get all the blame.
This is what they meant when they said “Roll Tide Roll,” as in a rising tide, as in a rising red tide, as in a tsunami of blood that can’t be washed out of integrated bathroom facilities, because if there is ever one universal third rail to justify segregation then it has to be those things that subjugate and humiliate the individual right out of their sense of community and belonging, i.e. their genitalia, their pigmentation, who they want to kiss, and especially if they pay their taxes.
This is what they meant
when they sang Look away! Look away!
Look away!
Paul Corman-Roberts is the author of the Fire Cracker nominated collection Bone Moon Palace from Black Lawrence Press. He is the co-founder and co-director of Collapse Press with Lynn Alexander. He occasionally plays drums with the US Ghostal Service and the There Their They’re.
