COLLEGE FEMINISMS: Poetry By Jaclyn Weber
The Walking Dead
Girl in my history class
totally started looking like a zombie from The Walking Dead.
Maybe I’m watching too much Walking Dead…
She’s shake, shake, shaking those rotten corpse legs in off-brand Ugg’s
in ripped up faded jeans blue.
In twenty five degree weather, but I guess zombies don’t care about Peoria snow.
Guess you don’t care when you’re not all there, when you’re rotten dead.
She’s pulling out her zombie iPhone 5, cherry glitter cover with writing
down the spine, screaming out,
“Keep calm and zombie on.”
Hesitating on the textbook history pages labeled “genocide.”
Go figure.
Warm festering fingers, lip-licking pictures on glossy pages.
Zombie girl has no time to be eating brains.
She’s got history class from 2:00-3:45 p.m. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.
Pulling out her pink Hollywood vitamin-water. Only the finest
for history majoring zombies.
Holding her brand name iPhone, instead of that text.
On her Facebook:
New status:
“Hungry for brains.”
Tumbling images of maggots on a 200 follower Tumblr page.
Stuck in her self-indulgent American culture,
bombing her zombie mind with “Yolo and Hella.”
Eating ten dollar Five Guys french fries,
beating the crawling cockroaches to this last minute supper.
White upper class private university zombie girl,
too mindless to thrive on a living mind.
Kicking the habit of learning.
Gonna be a walker.
Gonna move through with mindless walking herds,
dropping off knowledge to their feet,
dropping off their brains and trading up, eating up stereotypes,
mass media, creeping in tabloid worlds.
We are turning into…doomsday already came.
December 21, 2012 happened a long time ago.
Happened the day knowledge was dropped off the face of
the earth for Hallmark love cards and a Big Mac.
Happened the day zombie girl choked up her silver spoon.
I want cheese with that Big Mac.
Happened the day men told women rape became a choice,
birth control an accessory.
No tomato.
Happened the day we forgot politics is not a language,
forgot death is not the way to make a statement.
Extra onion please.
Happened the day schools became on-site memorials.
Yes, I would like mustard on that.
Happened the day American education was left behind.
Just add special sauce.
Happened the day young people raised their voice to bible
for the Kardashians instead of a Third World nation.
Hold the ketchup.
We got red zombie blood.
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White Delusional Disorder **
He carries a gun, not a briefcase,
wears button down polos, not military issued fatigues.
His Ray-Bans block out God’s ultraviolet praise,
pocket protectors and “I’m an honor student” bumper sticker,
on his mom’s mini van.
“He was just a good-kid-gone-bad.”
We’re delusional too:
Virginia Tech shooting: South Korean Male, U.S. Permanent Resident Status
I pledge
Sandy Hook: White Male, U.S. Citizen
Allegiance
Aurora: White Male, U.S. Citizen
to the flag
UT Austin: White Male, Former Marine sniper
of the Untied States of America
Columbine High School: Two White Males, U.S. Citizens
and to the Republic
Luby’s Massacre: White Male, U.S. Citizen
for which it stands
McDonald’s restaurant: White Male, U.S. Citizen
one nation
Edmond Post Office Massacre: White Male, U.S. Citizen
under God
Fort Hood, Texas: White Male, U.S. Army Major
with liberty
Camden Massacre: White Male, U.S. Citizen
and Justice
Geneva County Massacre: White Male, U.S. Citizen
for all
Binghamton Shooting: Vietnamese Male, Naturalized U.S. Citizen
Look at the painting we’ve airbrushed –
no massacre bullets, no colors,
mostly bleached reading lists, sartorial choices.
Our “Normal Rockwell” headline,
“This doesn’t happen in mid-white America.”
Let’s do some freedom math and
can you imagine being in white man’s shoes?
His power slipping away.
The one owning a gun but no voice.
Sandy Hook’s children saw Adam’s shoes.
They were converse blue,
like his copy Of Mice and Men and the book titled,
Train Your Brain to Get Happy.
We fear, we profile. They become victims.
Scapegoating Asperger’s, video games, religion,
and better yet,
let’s blame the mother.
She was a well-liked woman.
Enjoyed decorating holiday cakes,
one vanilla white in the shape of her son’s race.
** The author would like to attribute the title of this poem and its discussion to:
Alvin F Poussaint (2002) “Is Extreme Racism a Mental Illness?”
Alistair Munroe (2006) Delusional Disorder: Paranoia and Related Illness
David Leonard (2012) “Obama and the Death of White Power”
David Leonard (2013) “The Unbearable Invisibility of White Masculinity: Innocence in the Age of White Male Mass Shootings”
********************************************
The Up-to-the-Minute Religious Access Programming for Women
Born on the belt of justification of a woman’s Bible
guide to cooking turkey, without her turkey baster,
between her oven “Mitts,” an almost-president
trying to take her rights away. Her womanhood,
her green tights, bow, and arrows.
She’s the Katniss of housewives.
She’s a firestarter or better yet a red head from head to.
Last month her birth control cost her ninety dollars.
Yaz, that’s a lot of dough for one month of waiting to praise
of praising God that he made Jesus turn wine into her period.
As she sat on the porcelain God reading passages from Matthew 1:18AM:
The night the stars of Bethlehem hung heavy in the sky,
stains of glass stitched her porcelain face.
They came from the east,
those angelic glow preaches.
“What’s your name?”
Mary.
“She was a good fuck,” Cameal, Samael, and Gabriel said.
This is the date she will remember forever.
Tattooed on her arm, 9-13-12, her Holocaust.
Her holy of holies to be judged at arm’s length.
by a man holding her bible, her words,
the savior absent during the courtroom’s final veil
that rape is the new four letter word for…
Fuck, Mary had to visit the GYN.
Where she found a pamphlet with big block letters
proclaiming,
“Keep calm and there’s a clinic near by.”
Where Mary draws chalk lines.
Chalk is all she could find at the age of fourteen.
Thought chalk could defend her from snakes tongue
biting the apple of belief, claiming
her fetus’ finger tips feel pain more then Mary ever did.
The night-
her clothes were too tight and promiscuous.
“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image,
so that he may rule over the fish in the sea, the birds in the sky, over.’”
The night-
they slammed her head into bricks.
“So God created mankind in his own image.”
The night-
they made her give them up, the mouth, the tongue, her breast.
“And God saw that it was good.”
The night-
they used the metal rod.
My God she must not have felt pain.
I guess the media forgets “her.”
Sometimes she almost forgets him on top of her-
almost forgets his breath pushed up into her-
forgets almost the moment she became a statistic.
250,000 women’s wings are torn off each year.
What about the ones forgotten when we closed our eyes.
Because numbers like those, you can’t do the math,
because remember the stereotype,
Women are bad at math.
Can’t multiply David’s stars burned in her back,
subtract a cross-nailed to her legs and divide the hijabs choking her.
Open eyes to the addition of shoulder blades tugging to cliffs,
blessing new wings on the way down, the second coming of women.
________________________________________________
Jaclyn Weber is a California native and transfer student attending her final semester at Bradley University. She has a forthcoming piece in Collision Magazine and has published in Zaum Literary Magazine. Jaclyn’s work has been performed at Peoria’s lively Whisper and Shout reading series, the Cornell College University of Illinois Springfield, and Upper Iowa University Fine Arts Series. Jaclyn was awarded the 2013 and 2014 Academy of American Poets Prize and the 2013 Civil Rights Poetry Competition at Bradley University.
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