Ode to My Reflection in the Mirror (on just one day)

By Kathy Kremins

“I sat with my anger long enough until she told me her real name was grief.”     – C.S. Lewis

We are better than this     No, we are this     Always have been

Columbus   mission schools   Tulsa Race Massacre   Charlottesville
La Operacion   children in cages   smallpox   pipelines   voter suppression

We are better than this

Michael Brown   Vieques   ICE   Indian Removal Act   fracking   Jim Crow
Breonna Taylor   Ponce Massacre   MAGA   Trail of Tears   lynching

No, we are this

16th St. Baptist Church bombing   Trayvon Martin   Hurricane Maria
Trump   California Gold Rush   slavery   Emmett Till   Elijah McClain

Always have been

Japanese internment camps   Proud Boys   Wounded Knee   Ku Klux Klan
Charleston church shooting   Tuskegee experiment   eugenics   Brett Kavanaugh

We are better than this     No, we have never been

Kathy Kremins (she/her) is a Newark, N.J., native of Irish-Catholic immigrant parents and a retired public school teacher and coach. Her poetry chapbook, Undressing the World, was published by Finishing Line Press (2022). Kathy’s recent work appears in Gallery Affero’s ongoing Poem Booth Project: Make Me Want to Holler, Drunk Monkeys, Digging Through the Fat, Limp Wrist Magazine, Platform Review, Paterson Literary Review, Soup Can Magazine, The Night Heron Barks, Stay Salty; Life in the Garden State Anthology, Stillwater Review, Lavender Review, and Divine Feminist: An Anthology of Poetry & Art By Womxn and Non-Binary Folx, and other publications.

Photo credit: Cathy Baird via a Creative Commons license.

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