Got Your Back (An Angry Poem)

by Bryan Borland

I’m tired of being a dancing queen,
marching in disco rhythm, carrying
your loaded guns, wiping your sweat,
putting on our pretty faces with rouge
and blood.  We die, too, for freedom, for the sanctity
of countries who throw stones at swinging corpses.
We will lay down our bodies on your straight-
spined backs to protect you from falling bombs
but you’d rather lose a limb
than hear a story about my husband?
Fuck you, America. Fuck your selective freedom
and your unprejudiced bullets of war.  
Fuck our tender hearts for taking one
for the team, again and again. Fuck us
if we don’t take our trigger fingers and replace them
with our middle fingers the next time
our squadrons are ambushed;
may we finally decide to man-up,
to demand, to tell.

© Bryan Borland