Portside

The Insurrectionists Were Right

By Alison Luterman

The insurrectionists were right

something was stolen—not

the election, counted and recounted, nor

their livelihoods, abandoned, it seems,

without a second glance; not their womenfolk

who turned their cell-phone boasts and Facebook posts

over to the FBI, nor the Confederate statue, lassoed

by a million ropes and toppled

into the river, not even the fewer

and fewer white children playing cowboys

and Indians in vacant lots, or the more

and more Black youth winning

Merit scholarships--but something

aches, a phantom limb, the tongue

searching for its gone tooth, the stomach

ringing hollow no matter how many Big Macs

were eaten--something

has been mislaid, like a wallet

or the one set of keys

that unlocks the only car that still runs; something

once thought valueless, handed over

too easily, the way we relinquished

our wildness as children to sit behind little desks

made of molded plastic

miniature businessmen in training. Something

that has vanished like youth, elusive

as a coyote’s howl; open the door, there’s nothing

in the bare back yard but plundered

American desert where even now a jackrabbit

pauses to sniff the air—where is it where is it,

do you miss it too? I do. I miss

knowing what belonging to the land

might have felt like, long ago. I miss the honor

of shaping my footsteps to the pine needle path--

so even if I hate

what they did, I understand

that something is missing in the maelstrom of the lie

that made us American, something like an umbilicus

connecting us to this earth, something like innocence;

once gone you can never get it back.

Alison Luterman’s books of poems include The Largest Possible Life (Cleveland

State University press), See How We Almost Fly (Pearl Editions), Desire Zoo (Tia

Chucha Press), and In the Time of Great Fires (Catamaran Press). She has

published poems in The Sun Magazine, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, Rattle, The Atlanta

Review, and many other journals and anthologies. Two of her poems are included in

Billy Collins Poetry 180 project at the Library of Congress. Five of her personal

essays have been collected in the e-book Feral City, published at

www.shebooks.net. She has also written half a dozen plays, including a musical

about kidney transplantation. She has taught and/or been poet-in-residence at New

College in San Francisco, Holy Names College in Oakland, The Writing Salon in

Berkeley, at Esalen and Omega Institutes, at the Great Mother Conference, and at

various writing retreats all over the country. Check out her website

www.alisonluterman.net for more information.