My Most American Poem So Far

"Gold/Mine" Published in Emerge Literary Journal

My Most American Poem so Far

Gold/Mine

We worship it as we make our own God
from out the ground. Glitter floats in the impossible.
And I grew up obscure, as any calf
-skin wallet, a grain of dirt caught in the pan.
The step-child to starlight, constellation of ax.
Man hunched in a river sorting through
his sweaty ideas. Like all true Americas I want
to be somewhere else. Coin. Country. Lullaby.
Look. Cows come back from the black branches.
Let us crown ourselves
with mud. We of the stinking mines (mine. My own.)
We of the town of mines. The town of little gold
mushrooms growing out of wet ash
to fill our winter bowls
with cold.

Backstory

Back in 2018 the small, forested town of Paradise, CA burned up in the Camp Fire that devastated Butte County. Later it was determined that the Camp Fire had been caused by a faulty power line that had been neglected by PG&E. The whole fire and subsequent deaths and destruction could have been prevented for $15 worth of updates on PG&E’s equipment.

Some of you may know this, but I was raised in Paradise, CA. I hadn’t been back to the town in many, many years. But, needless to say, I started thinking about that town again, my time there, and what the fire meant to me. Then I started doing research on the town, its history, and what I uncovered intrigued and disturbed me.

The town, which was ultimately destroyed by a greedy public utility company that refused to prioritize human life over profit, was also built on greed and the destruction of human life too. In my research I realized just how vicious the pioneers who settled the town were to the Chumash Natives, to the land, and even to each other.

I generally don’t write a lot of political poems, but I found myself writing a lot of poems exploring the history of “Paradise.” This is the first of many, which was published by Emerge Literary Journal. My thanks to Theresa Senato Edwards for selecting this poem.

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