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The Highway Patrol stop DiVida

They want to see her

residency status

all she has is my passport

my picture

my place of birth

my expiration date

she tries to explain she is I

tells them

she is your try to do right

walk right talk right she

walk the straight line obey

she

never get stopped by the police

she

when they look at her in disbelief she tells them

she is Skip Gates and this is her house I

wouldn’t have been so nice and stagehand about it

I’d be, What the Frankenstein?

they’d wish they

had kept on going with their blinking lights

she wants to tell them

this ain’t South Africa it’s the USA she doesn’t want nobody

to (fill in the blanks)

she knows I don’t have any time for backroads logic

I’m sorry, Officers, I say, I forgot my ID.

from DiVidaFind more by Monica A. Hand at the library

Copyright © 2018 Monica A. Hand
Used with the permission of The Permissions Company, LLC on behalf of Alice James Books.

Published in Monica A. Hand Poems

This program is supported in part by a grant from the Idaho Humanities Council, a State-based program of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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