I’m having trouble with the notion that I am not “walking in another’s shoes” because I’m a college-educated New Yorker. An out-of-touch, East Coast liberal who can’t understand the pain of rural America today. I read this commentary about my kind daily. The only way I know to deal with my anger, the erasure of my experience by people who have never even met me, is through writing. I’ll resist Trump and Bannon. I’ll post my poems. Some just freewrites, some more worked. I wrote this one quickly, no real edits. But I wanted to get it up online. I’ll hold my experience close and know what it taught me.

The churches they could rent
off rutted country roads, gravel lots, bare land
then steeple. A kitchen door swung wide, rows of countertops,
the shining Formica, that pride taken in the looks of things.
My mother in her heels and shoulders-back apartness,
my father sure with his blood ties, while I was home in my
grandmother’s shadow. Sugar-faced and free from not-before-dinner
rules. My hands reaching for the cakes. Rows of bunt pan baking, pound
and sour cream, casseroles and meat plates. Steaming green beans and corn.
Some of the men’s work hands still holding stubborn bits of
earth or grease from machine spit labor. The women’s hands,
though, were ivory. Promised a better life, the men provided.
Infrequent reunions, that warmth of kitchen toil, the women’s soft
laughter, my sleepy gaze, as dusk fell on that abundance.

~Sharon Rousseau. 2.4.2017