Ode to My Reflection in the Mirror (on just one day)
By Kathy Kremins
“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.” – C.S. Lewis
We are better than this No, we are this Always have been
Columbus mission schools Tulsa Race Massacre Charlottesville
La Operacion children in cages smallpox pipelines voter suppression
We are better than this
Michael Brown Vieques ICE Indian Removal Act fracking Jim Crow
Breonna Taylor Ponce Massacre MAGA Trail of Tears lynching
No, we are this
16th St. Baptist Church bombing Trayvon Martin Hurricane Maria
Trump California Gold Rush slavery Emmett Till Elijah McClain
Always have been
Japanese internment camps Proud Boys Wounded Knee Ku Klux Klan
Charleston church shooting Tuskegee experiment eugenics Brett Kavanaugh
We are better than this No, we have never been
Kathy Kremins (she/her) is a Newark, N.J., native of Irish-Catholic immigrant parents and a retired public school teacher and coach. Her poetry chapbook, Undressing the World, was published by Finishing Line Press (2022). Kathy’s recent work appears in Gallery Affero’s ongoing Poem Booth Project: Make Me Want to Holler, Drunk Monkeys, Digging Through the Fat, Limp Wrist Magazine, Platform Review, Paterson Literary Review, Soup Can Magazine, The Night Heron Barks, Stay Salty; Life in the Garden State Anthology, Stillwater Review, Lavender Review, and Divine Feminist: An Anthology of Poetry & Art By Womxn and Non-Binary Folx, and other publications.
Photo credit: Cathy Baird via a Creative Commons license.
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