This Country Was a Genocide
We speak in tongues, our history.
Tell this country’s stories as anecdotes,
comparisons.
We talk in things we have not done.
Pass blame in fast-pitch
Call it helping, call it preservation
making sense of military action on lands
that twist our tongues,
mourn a fallen line of duty, plaquing names for
heroes, but never the civilians fallen from cross-fire.
We give them one name: Collateral Damage.
Now, we teach genocide as if it has a foreign tongue.
As if there is no blood
in our soil, as if this soil
is really ours.
Our silence is its own folk-tale.
Passing along the greater times of our country
as if it were non-fiction, call triumph auto-biographical
like all Americans share the same story.
We talk in past times as if America should be nostalgic,
as though there are things to miss.
Our history books are bound with spines,
bodies from nameless gravesites
call it: long time ago.
The beginning of this country was a genocide.
It hasn’t ended.
Skyler Jaye is a queer poet and writer. She's the NF editor of Variety Pack and the author of A Mountain of Past-Lives & Things I've Learned (Blazevox, 2019). She's been published online and in-print including Ligeia Magazine, Ghost City Press, Emrys Journal, and more.
Find her tweeting @SkylerJaye23 (she/her/they/them).
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