Sinister: just dust my heart, and you will find there are no fingers printed there.

[lindsey baker]

hello sinister.

it's july now, and i wonder if i am supposed to feel something for my 
country.

***

the boys are cutting their hair, i've noticed.
the temperature rises and it all comes
off: welcome the shepherdess and her shorn flock.
sometimes i wish i could be the one to wield
the scissors, but the boys i know castrate
themselves. i must rob them of something else.

***

independence day never makes me feel very independent. i always end up 
trapped in my grandmother's house, eating dry, stringy chicken and corn on 
the cob, trying not to go outside in the sweltering heat and pumping myself 
full of advil to fend off pending headaches before the pyrotechnics start. 
it all has this uneasy sense of the obligatory about it; this is a holiday, 
thus we must eat together around the table and say one of the four annual 
prayers thanking our probably absent god for food and family. and then we 
eat, and roll our eyes behind each others' backs at everything everyone 
says.

there is always a low-lying feeling of panic, i think, a need for escape 
into the normal regimes of our world, not the slowed, warped timezone of the 
picnic table on my grandma's patio.

***

when i was a little girl, there were few highlights to the fourth of july. i 
loved sparklers, and those, along with those little snappy things that 
resemble sperm and make a nice pop when you throw them at the sidewalk, were 
the only reasons i didn't sleep the day away.

i always hated fireworks. i hated those stupid little tanks and snakes that 
curl around the end of your driveway. i hated the smell of sulfer, and i was 
never allowed to light anything. so i sat around, threw my sperm poppers and 
sparkled for a while until i got ultra-bored, then went inside to read a 
book. and at night, i hated the booms of the big, flashy fireworks that 
everyone knows about. they were pretty, but i wasn't patient enough for that 
kind of pretty.

i wanted one big ten-minute spectacle with a good bit of neil diamond and 
then an ending.

but there was always the neighborhood rivalry, who could have the bigger, 
louder, longer, more colorful sky shows. and inside, televised, there was 
the fireworks spectacle at the baseball stadium in omaha. and there was 
whitney houston's national anthem and a picture on the television of bombs 
bursting in air superimposed over a picture of the the liberty bell.

a big stone bell with a big long crack.

and this was is america on the fourth day of july.

cracked and competitive and on fire.

***

it's a boys' holiday. and the boys keep telling me the reason they keep 
cutting their hair is because of the heat.

but i suspect it's so their hair won't catch fire.

***

i think i've been on sinister a year now. and i think i may have written of 
independence day before.

but it's better to listen to it, and nod with elliott when he says don't go 
to far, stay who you are.

and right now conor says i'll be grateful for this day, i'll be grateful for 
each day to come.

and i wonder why.

nobody needs a sparkler to sparkle, something in me says (in the voice of 
bron, i think). but i somehow have doubts for america. for an america 
sparkling. and independent. and free.

and if it ever happens. the way we celebrate it happening. then i will look 
down again and write:

she was free. to waste. away. alone.

***

and this is where i say goodbye to people who never bid the rest of us 
farewell.

love,
lou
xxx


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