Pamela Sumners
MARIE ANTOINETTE GETS ALL GAYED-UP AT THE SUPREME COURT
Now, Supreme Court, I will use my outdoor voice for choices
you made for me. You see, I want to have my cake and eat
it too. I want layers and layers and layers, gooey butterscotch
and groom’s cake, too, and I want a pediment love topping
it all. I want it to read, in sediment, “Equal Justice Under Law.”
I want my big gay wedding cake decorated in piggish, lardy florets,
one for every corner, and I want it to be so huge that Texas women
seeking the heavens by their hair will have a handy subterfuge.
I want a cake so layered that Stonehenge and Stonewall are there.
I want a cake that has a stolen verse of Leviticus curse, and just
more Texas hair. I want a cake with pictures of Jerry Falwell, either
Jr. or Sr.—I don’t much care and hey, well I’d prefer neither.
I want a big, gorgeous ee cummings mudluscious sound of you
putting your hand in mine when finally, I get to marry you after 30 years.
We had no cake.
We had to take the chance we could, at the city hall, while the window
was still open. But I’d like my reception, my gooey-butter cake, and
I will still eat cake, whether the Supremes likes it or fights it. I’m hungry.
Pamela Sumners is a civil rights and constitutional lawyer with a special interest in religion and speech law. As a native Alabamian, she has litigated against Roy Moore, Alabama Governor Fob James, Jay Sekulow, and Bill Pryor and can vividly describe their hairlines. Her first love, however, is poetry. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Streetlight (third-place winner), Mudlark, Snakeskin, UCity Review, New Verse News, Tahoma Review, Third Wednesday, BACOPA, California Quarterly, Loch Raven Review, and Blue Unicorn. She lives in St. Louis with her wife, teenage son, two lazy geriatric dogs, and a puppy who thinks his name is “Dammit.”
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