West Trade Review Online Exclusive: "It Seems in America, Loving Yourself Means Forgetting History" by Jordan Charlton

Jordan Charlton

Image by Jurien Huggins on Unsplash

Jordan Charlton is a PhD student in English at the University of Nebraska. He works with the Nebraska Writers Collective, working with both high school youth poets and incarcerated writers through the programs Louder Than a Bomb: Great Plains and Writers’ Block.

It Seems in America, Loving Yourself Means Forgetting History

But I won’t mention this in conversation.

It is like, how some experience time seems

imaginary, like the plot of folk tales,

urban legends, creation stories we—

and when I say we, I mean they—

might make up a new ending to, like something

that has been crafted to fit the science fiction

running throughout our nation & our classrooms.

I write now, remembering, again, that clerk calling us out,

my friend and I, us both like beanstalks,

thin,

and naïve to his attention, asking no

demanding we empty our pockets or else

we could not leave his store.

I mean

to write we were children, & thank our mothers we survived.

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