Matty Layne Glasgow
To the President of the Ames Community School Board
who said this proposal is just a political statement,
who said they will call this district a sanctuary,
& we sang education is a kind of refuge,
& we sang knowledge is a stained-glass window,
so let the sun shine that colored light on all our children,
& if they come for one of them, let them come for us all.
You see, I’m learning that a school board proposal can be
like a poem in some ways, because I’ve known men
who’d say this poem is just a political statement, too.
& they are white & straight & cis-gendered, like you,
& they tell us this is not the time or the place,
& they tell us art is no political animal, to put our fangs away.
& it’s kind of funny how you all use the word political
when it’s not about your child, & then you go on talking
about a multimillion-dollar natatorium years in the making,
but I’ve walked into a classroom, eyes fixed on an empty desk
that drowns in all that colored light, & I imagine
how they came for that child in the night, or the mother,
or the father, but we will never know. Have you heard
of America’s disappeared, the students we never see again?
This poem is for them. & it might be a political song,
but we will sing it through our fangs No subpoena? No dice, ICE.
& it will echo through those hollow desks, over stained-glass
broken in every color, & in that empty, empty light.
Matty Layne Glasgow is a queer pixie of a poet whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals here and there, including The Blueshift Journal, WILDNESS Journal, Rust+Moth, Flyway, HIV Here & Now, & The New Verse News. He is an MFA candidate in Creative Writing & Environment at Iowa State university, where he serves as the Poetry Editor for Flyway and teaches social justice rhetorics.
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