by Daliah Angelique

I want my covered wagon

I want my prairie isolation

I want to raise the church that will spit me out

I want my dysentery quick and neat

I want my accidental hemlock, come back feeding

the fever with the same clenched jaw

I want my parochial folkways

I want my shotgun shell penitence

I want my shimmering plague of locusts

I want my tired womb folded in the hope chest

I want a testament to my suffering that is promptly paved over and

I want my mother’s trauma sold to me as Tradition, a mandatory aching,

this Next Frontier of the same failed crops,

things stole not conquered,

Sabotage packaged as hope