J.D. Isip
Southern Comfort
Los Angeles does not prepare you for how white the world is outside
of barrios, mangling your Spanish to cashiers in Santa Ana or Hawaiian Gardens,
ghettos, real ghettos where it’s always summer and a Guatemalan baby races
in and out of the cascade of hose water being held by his sister screeching
with delight, both of them in their underwear, both stopping to wave
at a pick up weighed in the back by six sunburnt men coming from or going to
a half-built high rise in downtown Long Beach or some lawn too big
for the Filipino couple in Anaheim Hills who eye them suspiciously
and talk their selves out of the foolishness of tipping gardeners.
The South gets black, they might let a “son” slip out but usually not in the cities,
not in Atlanta or Houston. If you’re black and you’re from the South, you get
the South, even laud the way the food still reminds you of an old auntie who
remembers someone who remembers slavery, praise God for good church folk
who separate like it’s the 50s into the loud black churches and the giant
white churches with big screens and slick Southern sons preaching the good news
and everyone’s “real nice” when they meet you and let you sit on their bench
and, “Heck, just have the whole thing” since it seems they saw a friend
who might confirm whether or not you are, in fact, Iraqi, or Mexican, or a terrorist.
Out here it’s like you see Rome falling and white people losing their damn minds,
literally burning them up on meth or antidepressants because everyone
has bipolar disorder or cracked just a little when the uppity black “Hussein”
brought back the sting of “northern aggression”—they see more and more of us,
the horde of brown, feel ignorant and angry for fumbling the Indian names, Latino
names, names that sound like the Terrorist Watch List, all horseshit names
anyway, some people even ask, “But don’t you have, you know, an American name?”
Thing is, you do. You live here long enough, and you do. You’ll be Charlie or Joe
because it gives them comfort, and you see the guns, and you don’t want no trouble.
—Submitted on 04/30/2020
J.D. Isip is the author of Pocketing Feathers (Sadie Girl Press, 2015). His work in all genres has appeared in The Rainbow Journal, Elsewhere, Dual Coast Magazine, Poetry Quarterly, Rogue Agent, and other journals. Isip is an English professor in Plano, Texas.
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