Arithmetic

When Trump got elected, I lost my spirit. But now my fury is igniting it again. Like others who grew up with liars and cheats, I’m seeing played on the world stage what happened in my own family. My father was a con man, brutal and dictatorial, who fed on the destruction of others. His lies were constant and he lived by his own rules, only interested in accumulating money and power. He stole from everyone, including his children, and when he got caught, which was several times, he wriggled his way out.

How does one keep one’s sanity clause, in the words of Harpo Marx, when we have such a president? When so much of what we know to be true is said to be a lie, and blatant lies are presented—and reported—as reality? This poem is an attempt to answer that question, from my own experience.

My mother said we spent 
6 months in Mexico
1½ years in Nassau
1½ in Jacksonville
1½ years in Miami Beach
 
6 months + 1½ years + 1½ years + 1½ years = 5 years
 
I was 10 years old 
when we moved back to New York
7 when we’d left
 
10 – 7 = 3

It used to be said there were two sexes
Later the word gender was used
as if we’re all either male or female
Not a range of female or male 
as if we exist on a spectrum
just like our political views
our social status, our preferences
our individual and collective selves
And then non-binary added to the list,
formerly androgynous, to describe 
people who might look 
like a particular sex or gender
but not identify with it

Are we who we are
or how we identify? I wanted to be 
seen as a somebody like my brothers
but I wasn’t a boy
I wanted to be seen as smart
but there wasn’t room for smart
a title held by my father 
and the eldest, his confidante
when he felt like it
I was always an artist 
but not for me either
my sister was the artist

In a family of seven children
with only room for one 
I was the middle child, lost 
in the shuffle as my mother 
with her blank eyes 
would say in later years
when I was still trying to get 
her o sole mio attention

Male, female, male-to-female, 
female-to-male, non-binary; 
if we want to categorize
why not five genders? Isn’t that
saying what is, is? A man who never
had a period, can he be a woman?
If I identify as a somebody, 
does that mean I will be seen 
as a somebody?

Isn’t saying that we were away three years,
naming the years and months in each place
an anchor thrown in the waters of confusion
the arithmetic I want to live by?
Isn’t naming the $25 billion denied 
to end child hunger, when $400 billion 
is owned by one of the two 
who are unmooring 250 years 
of not good enough
to the worst it could be? 

How many numbers are needed 
to count the damage of not seeing
real as real, for not naming, for not living
by In the beginning there was the Word,
and to paraphrase by this one non-religious person, 
and the Word is Power?