TRUMP SAYS MY COLLEGE TOWN HAS IMMIGRANTS WHO ARE EATING THEIR PETS
We used to dance at the Regency Room in downtown Springfield on some
Thursday nights on Fountain Boulevard, all of us getting a ride
from whomever had a car and would take us there. We didn’t drink
back then but ordered pop or ice water and pretended we were older
and I would act like I was not looking for the RA I had a crush on
who had dated me then dropped me abruptly for another girl down the hall
even though in the years to come he would tell me how much he liked me
still, how he regretted the break, and I would look for him in so many
places—the Union, the pathway between Thomas Library and Firestine Hall,
and at every party, every gathering where students danced or smoked weed
or drank from the barrel juice someone had concocted of every alcohol-filled
green or brown or clear bottle. I found him, once or twice, and he had a way
of lying—to himself or to me, I’ll never know—and it would pull me back
into his orbit, or I threw myself into it. You get too close to some things
and they burn. A lie is kindling. Belief is the paper, sticks, all the wishes
for a thing that isn’t. Someone who builds a bonfire must be careful with the flame.
Someone who acts like the sun must tell people not to look directly into his eyes.
I looked for so long, I learned about a lie’s brightness. One day I saw him,
years later, and he seemed so easy to find. My eyes had adjusted, and I
understood darkness: how to touch it, and then how to walk away.
—from Poets Respond
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Shuly Xóchitl Cawood: “In the debate, Trump says that immigrants in Springfield, OH (where I went to college) has immigrants who are eating pets. I was thinking about how people believe lies, get swept up in charisma, so I wrote this poem about how that happened to me.” (web)
