Charlene Moskal
Crossroads
They dance, spin, are whirling dervishes,
flames licking at their heels,
naked rebels on the newly dug grave of politics.
They are under a chupa of stars,
bloody stripes, white bandages,
bewildered, betrayed, bedeviled ghosts.
Bare, chthonic limbs fly up, lifted high,
melting in the furious smoke of the dance
before anyone notices they were here.
Shadow voices rendered speechless,
lost in the static of tweets and sound bits.
Mad men and media moguls,
a din of Babylonian proportions;
sanctions, laws, lies, filibusters,
televised interviews,
divisive, arrogant, prideful.
Idealism kicked in the balls,
halved and eaten by power hungry wolves.
Doctrines of hope stripped away, whipped away.
Scars on the backs of peons, slaves,
disenchanted, disillusioned, disenfranchised.
Now at a crossroads, a beggar on a crucifix
hoping for a cup of honesty to drink,
to quench the lies of the past,
to give sustenance to the future.
Still dancing, bared legs, arms stretching,
the rebels reach for sanity, strength to pull down walls
of indifference, of xenophobia.
America, your beauty is there,
masked, sullied under the rouge of pimps.
In dreams I see the mask cracking
like egg white on dead monarch’s faces.
In dreams, America is once again a girl,
café color, eyes green as the oceans.
She skims pebbles in a pond;
each carries a prayer for her future.
Charlene Moskal lives and writes in the vibrant arts community of Las Vegas, Nevada. She has had many arts incarnations but writing has been a constant.
Her poems and prose have been published in: Voices From the Rio Grande; CLARK; Poets of Clark County, Nevada; Legs of Tumbleweed; Wings of Lace, An Anthology of Literature by Nevada Women; issues of The Raven’s Perch, Sky Island Journal; and Dash. She will have a chapbook, One Bare Foot, released this May by Zeitgeist Press. She is a fellow of the N.J. Writing Project, works with the Alzheimer’s Poetry Project, and writes and performs for StorySlam, Las Vegas.
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