I Was Reared by my Country's Mythology

By Alice Costas

I don't believe in Wilbur saved the axe on the morning by Fern
Dorothy "dog in a basket" gale,
or a country that displays ruby slippers in the lawmaker's crated closet.
May the myth f clicking heels out a sorry allegory into worse reality perpetuate
itself on the tongues of Children.
And two blocks away Lincoln's High-Chair refashions a war as the stitching of
borderlines and fallen economies, we don't recognize the bodies upon which it stood.

I don't believe in Holder Caulfield or the Rockefellers, and on other fire escapes, Tony
Maria and I want to be American. In Cristobel Colon, on Helen who blinded men for
betraying her beauty, yet was a real person, in Oe tied to Zeus's apple try like my family in Greece to their burnt orchard.

In Arnold Schwarzenegger in Anne with an E. I don't believe in red hair as a sign of temperament.

In John F. Kennedy and Abraham Lincoln, although McKinley is not a part of this poem.

I don't believe in dumping tea from the damn boat into the harbor, or across Boston on a horse, Bunyan and Sacagawea in this country milking with corn, and the occasional blanket tinged with smallpox.

In exponential growth, or divine mandates.

In my father who wanted to be an artist but became a scientist, I don't believe the bricks that flew through his window in 1968 but also in his friend who is the artist lips curled with vodka instead of food, may we all embody stereotypes as our own.

In green design and three righteous arrows of recycling.

I don't believe in the stacking of word like the jungle blocks from my apartment in which pigs were slaughtered and other pigs sent men to crackle in vats of oil, but I also don't believe in Upton Sinclair. In Al Capone and John Dillinger's scarred fingerprints and silver chair.

In my father's father who stowed away on the last boat before the Nazi's closed the port, loved money so much he blinded himself watching the stock ticker, although 20 years in the steel yards probably contributed, died surrounded by three college educated children.

But also for my mother's father, who left the family to start a new one, was found in his lazy-boy six days dead after trying to treat heart disease with paprika, his Alzheimer ridden wife, fro whom he requested G-d's intersession but not medicine's lay on the couch to addled to realize his dead body.

That may be the mythology they left and that may be mine.