by strangedayonplanetearth

journal 7.4.24

I resent this perhaps more than any other shrink-wrapped Amerikan high holy day because I can’t simply close the door to the 99-cent polyester flags at Walgreens, can’t just silence my phone to images of nieces and nephews in star-spangled drag — when there is still the sound, the relentless BOOM BOOM BOOM penetrating walls and nerves. The sacred anthem of a war machine called a land.

And I woke thinking of my own rape, or not in need of thought at all, for it is always there, particularly in the sticky arms of the cursed month known as July for the dictator perpetuo. Always there like the feeling of wrongness of this place, of land owned and unknown. I wrote other dates on my calendar this year — Bear River Massacre, 1863, Sacramento River Massacre, 1846, Coshocton Massacre, 1781, Bloody Island Massacre, 1850 — all of which passed in a haze of stress, unmourned and unmarked. I still don’t know what happened there, what happened here, in the God-blessed, broad-striped, bright-starred New World, land of placelessness.

Yet I did remember to purchase a new cotton mattress protector with promo code JULY4 wielding an extra 20-percent off.

I moved again; I have a tiny yard; I adore this yard and it is the closest a person can get to placefulness when living on war bounty rented out by the month. I moved and it mattered not to the people whose walls I shared and names I never knew. It mattered to Monarch Properties, Inc. as opportunity to retain most of my deposit on fabricated grounds. Ordinary theft, daily violation. Just a corporation: it’s not supposed to hurt, not supposed to burrow deep into your cells and scour over the place that knows it will always be homeless in the truest sense of the word.

No part of me wanted to remember how easy I am to violate, what power means and how it’s traded inside placelessness. But I didn’t have to remember; that knowledge is always there, too.

Another day at the shrine of money inside the Temple of Man, and I resent the war sounds and char-broiled stench of it all.

Somewhere, everywhere, people are laying down picnic blankets and toasting with wine coolers and I am desperately relieved to be alone here, in the greatest chance of placefulness I can brush against, in a small yard owned by a man who of course did not complete the work this week as promised, listening to a weed wacker and the occasional deep growls of the dog on the other side of the fence, bracing for the next BOOM.

This is the greatest allowable degree of freedom a woman might enjoy inside this 248-year-old erection decked in red, white, and blue: no husband, one small yard. I do not celebrate today but I grasp that shard with everything in me.

Image: modified photograph by nakashi via Wikimedia Commons