By Sydney Mayes

if we must begin, with our mouths pried open

the way a toddler might pry open a pistachio,

against the lawless men, who hold their mouths,

not open to dew or gnat or stray bluebird, but closed

and twisted tight against microphone, who rule

not as men with mouths but as loam-tracked

into apartment, fertile with colonies of silverfish

and sickness, against we, who have mouths so

open, no sound makes it farther than the front door

we, with our power, said to be socked away

in the mouths of law-making men, our power seen

only through oral mucosal x-rays of their milk

whetted mouths. we need the way the cardinal hen

needs to be both * red and * nest, to tear down

the myths of singularity, of land muffled

by exceptionalism and concrete, to tear down terror.

we will help you, you who daydreams of ballots

and sutures to puncture and seal lips of rucksack

and buffalograss, you who have been taught to see

the vowels in money lingering in “prosperous

and free,” we will help you—we who watch

the lawful men cull us with ruddy hands in premature

harvest, who see torture in the spines of kin,

we who question those who tight lipped proclaim:

under the new regime of the ever-compounding dirt,

the tyrant will soon be gone, the mouth will learn

the unsafety of the exposed tongue, the days will become

bluer until they become white. the day of your liberation is near.

We is the People