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.