(Non)fictions
A Goat
Call Me When You Get There
Embers
Fidelity
Free Country
Free to Good Home
Last Meanings
Maintenance
Monotype
Protocol for Disaster
The Anesthesiologist
Three-Day Weekend
Where My Mother Goes
외국인
Free Country
Jessica Hammack
My childhood wasn’t so bad. I had a stack
of Noxzema pads, a trundle bed.
I had ketchup sandwiches, and a yard,
a ditch where onions grew, fat and purple.
Back then my teachers said war was good
for the economy, and instead of I don’t care
my friends and I would say Free country,
as if that gave us permission to do anything
we wanted, like hock loogies out the bus window,
or say that we, too, could become President
someday, despite all evidence to the contrary.
To me, the sweater of America
had only just begun unraveling: imagine,
I had never seen a murder on a telephone.
I hadn’t even heard of student loans,
or proxy wars, or mortgages gone underwater.
I used to draw the ocean full of smiling fish.
I had a crush on Officer Kip, the DARE cop,
who, the first week of class, set out a box
that said, in navy Sharpie, Tell Me Everything.
From my assigned seat, I wrote what I was told.
Back then, I believed that growing up meant being free.
That I could choose my life. I really thought
that they would ask, and I could just say no.