by Carmen Barefield
After all, God said “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
But I don’t have it in me, not after the deep
rotting hatred of my neighbor seeped
through the thin wall of plaster and horse-hair.
After all, everyone is to blame.
Everyone except for the God-fearing,
white men like himself.
I think of fear and God, and I struggle to love
in a country where my neighbor speaks ill of me and my Black kin.
Love is hard to give when shaking with anger
as he screams again and again, that slur with a hard -er.
His white woman replies, softer with her venom.
Maybe she agrees with him.
Maybe she’s vehemently opposed.
But I search and search and find no love for her either.
Because she still lays down with him at night.
Still shares her cigarette butt with him at dawn.
It’s not as if they have no love though.
Through the window, I can hear them coo
and coddle a wild gray squirrel.
Call it baby, call it lovely, sweet boy.
They leave water out for it while they spit
over the porch at passersby.
Each day they leave a trail of seeds and nuts
to the home they built for their gray squirrel
on the shared porch.
I avoid them all and their squirrel whenever possible.
No love lost there, but when I do take
the creaking back stairs, it is now the squirrel
who pokes his gray head out the door.
Watchful and wary. Eyes beady, the whites watery.
He’s thicker now, well-fed.
He waits till I’m unmoving, then goes back inside,
slams the door with his bushy tail,
turns to his woman squirrel who’s as washed out as him,
and screams every hateful word he’s ever heard.
Carmen Barefield (she/her) is a poet and writer living in Salem, Massachusetts. She is also a Watering Hole Poetry Fellow. Some of her work can be found in The Elevation Review, Popshot Magazine, Kissing Dynamite, and Poetry Quarterly. You can find out more about her at carmenbarefield.com.