Michele Lesko
Truth
She awoke awash in chills
the day that was all mourning.
She once-upon-a-time told them
the boy, who punched his locker
said, fuck you, and sauntered past
pinched white faces, was Truth.
Truth told it all in the instant his fist
put an end-stopped, final mark
on his sentence. He was sentenced
from birth to the fear on their faces.
This weight Truth bore, like a hum
behind his brain, was an everyday
ache. Another boy, who wrote
precisely what he was told
to write to get by, went slowly
blind inside from putting down
all his thoughts in tiny but perfect
letters. Mothers-fathers-coaches
didn’t suspect insurrection. White
light glared as this silent boy sat
among the brown people in a church
in the south. Parishioners in the parish
about to perish, not from the humid
passion of their pastor preaching
beneath a simple white steeple
but from the boy who came to rid
himself of humanity. Families there
were saved, baptized by the blood
of the lamb. Truth was shot down
dead on the day he lifted his eyes
to question the officer in charge
of a taillight out traffic stop.
The white boy, no one ever asked
why, carried out his plan with no sign
of protest. He never yelled fuck you.
No one questioned this boy who hid
his simmer inside his head. His pride
his heritage this same story was all
his to collect, compose, create
a morning, where nine crumbled
to the floor before the altar of our
God. He lives today and breathes
while others like him remain blanks
on the page. And her hollerin’ boy
Truth lays quiet beneath the dirt
of a churchyard like any other
filled with brown boys’ bodies
that lived loud in their forever
present-tense posture of protest.
She once held in her open arms
the bleeding heart of the matter.
Michele Lesko is the founding editor of IthacaLit. Her poems and short stories have appeared in The Southern California Review, The Pedestal Magazine, Anon, and other journals. She holds an MFA from Fairleigh Dickinson University and currently works as a teacher.
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