Debra Shigley
Dream Machine
American Dream:
Work hard. Buy a house. Raise a family.
Okay, but isn’t that
for suckers?
Here’s another quintessential
American Dream:
Get rich quick. Gold rush. Dot-com boom.
High-growth startup.
Game Stop rallying.
Insta-famous.
We invented these things.
Is it the American Dream
To own a dry cleaner
or a taxicab
or a Dunkin’ Donuts?
Is it the American Dream
to squeak in on a “plus factor”
or an actual quota?
She thinks so.
Is it the American Dream
to walk through
your neighborhood at night
and not get shot?
He thinks so.
Whose American Dream is it
to touch the soil
and feel
free?
Rough passages
But here, today,
you can marry whom you like
in whatever church you like.
That’s not nothing.
You can also buy crap
on infomercials
or scrolling
late into the night.
Do you have bootstraps?
Hard work (that fiction) elevates
only some.
American Prism:
refracted rainbows
gleaming, cascading
City on a Hill?
That depends
on who’s
looking.
—Submitted on 02/01/2021
Debra Shigley is the author of The Go-Getter Girl’s Guide (St. Martin’s Press, 2009). She holds a BA from Harvard and a JD from Georgia State. She worked as an editor at Atlanta Magazine and briefly practiced law before appearing regularly as a lifestyle expert on the likes of The Today Show and CNN. Moving to Mexico City, Shigley, who is biracial and Jewish, launched a hairstyling service for women of color. She is an on-air host for Local Now, a news app at The Weather Channel. Shigley lives on a farm in Milton, Ga., with her husband, five children, a barn, a garden, pecan trees, and pigs.
SUBMIT to A River Sings via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem and you value our online series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.
Editor’s Note: The series title A River Sings is borrowed from “On the Pulse of Morning,” the poem read by Maya Angelou at the inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993.
