Sarah Beddow
Dispatch
re: End of Year Party
In the beer garden with white sailor hats because / one of our team building activities was to / decorate sailor hats The music is entirely / white Pittsburgh nothing but / The Eagles The Stones Steve Miller Band The Dead CCR The / Who And I pause / for a moment / Even this 11 am crowd of / burned out teachers / in all our womanity all we get is / the culture of white men Later / at lunch / as I turn from white to bright red in the midday sun of mid June / I argue with Hayes about whiteness / A white man he does not believe / Ta-Nehisi Coates got his own / story right and I have been drinking for hours already / so I bite You can disagree with his conclusions / I am still teaching / but you cannot tell him his experiences / are false This / is the English 12 rule of Socratic seminars / Hayes does not get it is / drunk too Coates could change / his story if only / he wanted to The Dream / is for all of us / America the beautiful and some shit When I say next that / my / identity too deeply informs / my / life he snortles through some beer I can say all the shit I say because I am small and blonde I am pretty in the face I can swear a hot streak call my boss an idiot / in so many words / and all I get is / plaudits Hayes says / Who said you're pretty / Oh haha white man as if every man I've ever known like you hasn't told me so / in as many ways as he can figure / from his hands all over me to his eyes all over me to his / requests for my time when I am busy to his requests for my time / when I am disinterested To his body naked / in my bed when I’m thirsty I drink / more beer I would not / be me without this face this / white skin this / compact body This body now drunk and tired of / careful elisions and snickering eye rolls In the car ride home / of course Moby on the radio / making his fortune even these fifteen years later appropriating Black voices I used to fuck / to Moby who knows how many times / Body on fire and body / soaked in the comedown White body lying / by white body Hearing but / not hearing the voices The Dream subsumed in our wantonness and / sleep
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Dispatch
re: We mustn’t dwell, no not today
Bless Netflix for Empire Records / even tho I already have it on blu ray / My friend Joanna from college watched it and said / I don't get it Flippantly / I told her it was too late for her But then / I meditated on / why it's such a soft blanket a cozy fire of dancing flames / It’s like how Mr. Murray bought Ms. Long / a Spongebob popsicle from the Family / Dollar on Friday because he knew she loved them / and there they were in their cotton candy flavored glory / at the checkout as he waited to pay for his chips Like how the / joy spread across her face as she picked Spongebob’s bubblegum eyes off in the staff lounge / to save for later That / is Empire Records / the tattooed gum chewing freaks love / even as they fight / and their beloved record store succumbs to amoral corporatization Yes they / do / think they're so happy and so / goddamn great / because they draw together like a / family hunkered in a basement waiting / for a storm to pass We are waiting out / this / storm We are laughing in the staff lounge at how Murray saw a bird eating a chicken wing in the parking lot and / even my colleagues who do not look for / metaphors in everything understand / the grimness of / this / one Are we drawing together for support or are we eating each other to sate our / personal hungers We laugh again We do not / question for we mustn’t dwell no / not today When the credits roll and one day / they will we know we will / dance on the rooftop with hands joined