Robbie Gamble – Writers Resist

The Wall that Trump Built

A dystopian cumulative tale by Robbie Gamble

This is the wall that Trump built.

This is the base that supported the wall that Trump built.

This is the anger that stirred up the base that supported the wall that Trump built.

These are the migrants, the “rapists and thugs,” such a shadowy danger disturbing the base that supported the wall that Trump built.

This is the border, impossibly long, so porous and broken, allowing the migrants to enter the shadows and rile up the base that demanded the wall that Trump built.

This is a trade deal, it’s complex and cruel: It regulates cross-border movement of goods, forcing loopholes and quotas to broker an edge for tycoons with free assets, ignoring the base that turned out for the wall that Trump built.

These are the jobs in old factories and plants that were culled out through high economic design, pushing robots or outsourcing, labor be damned! Low-skilled workers get broken and pushed to the edge by tycoons who contemptuously leaned on their base to deliver the wall that Trump built.

Now look! Here comes the scapegoating, racist and raw, pumping Rust Belt resentment through cynical rants, perpetrated by pundits decreeing false fears of the Muslim, or Mexican, wild-eyed and brown, terrorizing communities over the edge of what once “made us great,” now an insecure race, huddled back of the wall that Trump built.

And this is our hemisphere, wary and sore, home to natives, conquistadors, entrepreneurs, and then waves upon waves of the tired and poor, out of steerage, from bondage, from privilege too. An evolving community, fractious yet proud; wracked with growing pains, now on a small-minded course. Will we go it alone? You can see it from space: that raw scar of a wall that Trump built.

Robbie Gamble’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Scoundrel Time, Solstice, RHINO, Pangyrus, and Poet Lore. He was the winner of the 2017 Carve Poetry prize. He works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston, Massachusetts.

Trumpty Dumpty image from the U.S. Library of Congress.

Empty Plinths

By Robbie Gamble

That history was cast, it had its time
to patina publically, those grandiose bits:

goatees, greatcoats and spurs all sober
and saddle-erect, hauled down amid

conflicted outcries of righteous mobs, or
unbolted and forklifted away into the night.

Let the sullen air settle. In municipal
plazas, the plinths remain stolid,

their bare cornices uplifting
nothing, explaining away nothing.

Let their marble shoulders relax.
Give some time for the charged space

above them to reassemble, and not
in the chaos of clubs and torches,

cars-as-projectiles. History is messy
enough. Meanwhile, catalogue

the bronze artifacts, arrange for them
a suitable warehouse. Honor instead

the stories of the statueless, the diasporaed,
the not-as-yet-emancipated. Let these

coalesce and flow into awareness beyond
plinths, beyond rancor, beyond dispute.

Robbie Gamble lives in Brookline, Massachusetts, and works as a nurse practitioner caring for homeless people in Boston. He recently completed an MFA in poetry at Lesley University.

Image credit:Copyright Philip Halling and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence.