Michael McKeown Bondhus
Neoliberalism
Fuck the Police Emergency Action, Brooklyn, 2019
Blocking traffic
I’m reminded
how little I know—not
the endemic ignorance
of whiteness, but
the stupidity of a boy
incapable of grasping
the various things I’ll understand
when I’m older (which is now)—my TIAA-CREF,
our home mortgage rate,
adding deductions on returns, accounting
for deductibles when paying
for the pills I need to take. I know nothing
of how life works.
Suddenly, I can’t define racism or neoliberalism,
much less explain what they have to do with me being here
in the middle of Flatbush Ave
while you stand on every
sidewalk and tell me about the time I was 12 and called you
a racist
(because you are)
and your laugh then was the bark and snarl
of a dog guarding a glass house
as you told me all the awful things
you knew about black people,
an entire race in conspiracy against you
and me (not all
of them like that,
but you know,
most)
and then there were the facts (someone told you),
and then the things you saw yourself
(like the time you drove
in downtown Bridgeport
on your way back from Van Halen),
and at 12 years old I had no answers
to any of this, no answers to your love for me,
your little moron,
who “someday will get it,”
but I still don’t
or maybe I do
and that’s why I’m here
in skin that fits
better than it should, constantly
checking
myself.
—Submitted on 08/29/2020
Michael McKeown Bondhus (formerly Charlie) is an Irish-American writer. He’s the author of Divining Bones (Sundress, 2018) and All the Heat We Could Carry (Main Street Rag, 2013), winner of the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry from the Publishing Triangle. His work has appeared in Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, The Missouri Review, Columbia Journal, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other journals. He has received fellowships from the Virginia Center for Creative Arts, the Sundress Academy for the Arts, and the Hawthornden Castle International Retreat for Writers. He is associate professor of English at Raritan Valley Community College (New Jersey—unceded Lenape land). More at: charliebondhus.com.
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