Us vs Them
BY DAVID TOMAS MARTINEZ
My childhood was not an anxious place,
though I lay
in my bed, awake, thumbing
my sheets like beads, wondering when the sun
imploded
would Russian astronauts be OK,
they in their Sputniks, with their space dogs,
they that chased their own tail
around this water bowl
we call Earth. When I was a child,
in elementary school
we practiced a type of
protection
called Duck and Cover,
where we huddled
under desks in case of a nuclear
attack
by the Russians. They were communists,
had the bomb, and were evil
Reagan told us
from the small grave
of a TV screen.
In the sixties, Nixon said the same
thing, and the Panthers
countered with "the Viet Cong never
called me nigger" With their picks
like unclenched fists,
with their afros like the plume of an atom bomb,
they scared white and black folks alike. It is 2014,
and America is still scared of
the Russians and black people;
now the American Dream is to be debt free,
which I am not, nor may ever be, but at least
I'm no longer afraid of the Russians.
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