Tara Hardy - For the Red States

Tara Hardy was our featured performer on the 19th of March at the Vancouver Poetry Slam. This is her poem For the Red States.

OK so, this is for the red states.

Stupid.

[laughter from the crowd]

My uncle Melvin is stupid.

He voted for George Bush

hell, he voted for Bush Sr.

when something like this, read my lips, no new taxes.

That time, like this time, the Democrats were not speaking a working people's language.

Oh sure, their candidates' arguments were all nuanced and complex

but what the hell does that mean to my uncle Melvin?

Whose parents sat him in front of a television since before he could walk, why?

Because it's the option for exhausted labourers.

People whose hands will never fully soften

no matter how much pumice they apply the skin grows that way.

People keeping the bunion pad companies in business

from standing in bad shoes on assembly lines for lifetimes.

People whose primary source of entertainment is, no stretch, the television.

Because after a day on your feet what a body needs is rest.

Exercise is something people do who sit at computers all day.

It was from the television that my uncle Melvin learned to absorb information

in highly emotional, over-simplified soundbites,

so his very head works that way,

but because he's stupid? No.

Because he's brainwashed.

Brainwashed and kept poor by underpaying his labour

from the time he dropped out to support his sisters

to today, when he can't even afford to buy his wife a proper set of teeth.

I'm not kidding here, and it isn't funny.

My aunt Juanita has permanent sores in her mouth from her ill-fitting dentures

which by the way without them?

she can't even go to the bathroom in the night for fear of someone seein' her.

Shame comes standard in my family.

My uncle Melvin is powerless to purchase his wife some relief

but we offer him a presidential "choice":

a guy with a fancy education or someone who sounds like a down home boy promising no new taxes,

no more bite out of this backbone that ain't gonna outlast the mortgage on the trailer.

This is not fiction.

The trailer is white and he'd like to get a fence to keep the rabbits out of the pansies.

Melvin is gonna vote his pocketbook.

Cause maybe Juanita can get some teeth.

Think about your own.

Touch them with your tongue.

Now imagine the person you love the most live without them.

Face the world and try to feel beautiful or worthy.

Melvin is gonna vote for the guy who promises to put more power in his pocket.

If the Democrats haven't learned that yet, then they're the dummies not the people who didn't vote for them.

Have I mentioned that my aunt Juanita can't read.

I am a slim generation away from not being able to decipher my own ballot.

But yeah, Melvin responds to over-simplified, deep-fried versions of the truth, but why?

Cause it's been his diet for as long as he can remember.

"Have some turkey" he says to me at Thanksgiving

and then he covers the gap in his own smile with his palm.

I slather my potatoes in Juanita's gravy,

and for shame will not interject my opinion

when at his table in front of his bounty he asks me to bow my head and pray, why?

Because what right do I have to judge their source of hope, really?

During Grace, I know that my uncle's god is someone who hates me and my depraved coastal ways,

so once again I am torn.

Acutely aware of how far apart are both my homes

My hand in Melvin's my cheek warms with cowardice

over having left my whole family behind in search of my own freedom.

Just as quick, the other cheek cools with dread at the hate that is blooming in my new home

from stealth bias and a full body disgust

my liberal friends are condemning entire red regions as idiots incapable of nourishing themselves

out of the rickets that has rotted their brains.

Not new, certainly, but shocking as hell out of the mouths of people with whom I shared values.

More than ever, I am straddling two boats hell bent of rowing in opposite directions.

I wake up sweaty with the pressure to choose and choking on the privilege it is to have the option in the first place.

Some days, I am side by side with my chosen, if depraved, queer family.

Damn right, I say, fucken homophobes.

I think about the last public hate crime that happened in my midwest town and feel sick.

Two gay men, sleeping, wake to find their house being painted with "FAGGOTS GO HOME".

When I think about how this coulda happened, I remember who used to live there.

The Geiger girls,

whose father and uncle worked around silos all their lives.

But during the 80's farm crisis "accidentally" walked into one,

where overcome by fumes each died in his brother's arms so their families might make it on the insurance money.

Which they did for about a decade before Jim and Joseph looking for a weekend refuge from the city

bought the whole farm plus house for a screamin' deal.

As artists they had plans to redecorate.

And I quote: "Have these people ever heard of PAINT??"

Yeah, we have.

And sometimes what gets called homophobia is a little more complicated than that.

Closer to home, I think about my Seattle neighbourhood gone white in seven years.

Not so when I moved in, but then again, white dykes are the first wave of gentrification.

I sit with that in my pocket and look down at my rapidly separating feet,

both boats spilling over with white people.

From this position, I have this to respectfully say to my queer peers:

Gay marriage is something the privileged, specifically college educated people, can afford to long for,

and it feels like a middle class agenda.

For me, given a choice, I'd sell out my middle class peers any day for equal pay for equal work

but not in the way the feminists thought of it

---which by the way preserved the class order ---

but in the way that says an hour is an hour is an hour.

I don't care if you're pushing a broom or paper, you outta get paid the same.

If we mean what we say in this country that all men are created equal

then it follows that we all have the same relationship to time,

that it's precious, and_ you gotta be compensated.

So, this is to say that I don't think we were defeated because of the middle state homophobes.

We were defeated because we haven't begun to address working people's needs

let alone truly align ourselves with people of colour.

We let the right use us as a smokescreen to their real agendas:

keeping the poor poor and eroding civil rights of people of colour.

If all queers starting today, devoted our lives full time to economic justice,

I would not be surprised if we'd have our gay marriage sooner than Melvin and Juanita will get that fence.

And if all Democrats starting today devoted their party to an hour is an hour?

Well I'd guarantee that every toothless bastard in dumfuck everywhere would vote for that

before you could say read my lips

NEW. CLASS. ORDER.

[applause]