The Snake

At the Save America rallies, after the damnation of the criminal aliens breaking
across our borders and 1,900 percent more murders, he would ask the crowds
if he could read a poem. This has to do with immigration, he’d say. The crowds
would whoop and yip. He’d read “The Snake,” words stolen from a song, from
the hand of a dead Black singer who could not snatch it back, a jazz fable
spun on vinyl, a tale from the fabulist of Greece centuries before Christ.

The crowds would listen to the poem: Bikers for Trump, Cops for Trump, Uncle
Sam in his beard, the Statue of Liberty in her crown, the millionaire who sells
pillows on TV. They would testify in T-shirts that said jesus is my savior, trump
is my president. They would hoist the Stars and Bars or signs that rhymed:
trump 24 or before. They would see the movie of the poem in their heads:

The snake frozen on the road, the woman scooping him up tight to nurse
him with milk and honey by the fire, the incandescence of his skin brought
back to life, the woman’s kiss and the viper’s venomous bite, her question
why, then the words oozing from his tongue: You knew damn well I was a snake
before you took me in. The crowds would howl at the moral, at the punch line,
at the tender woman who would die of tenderness. Like a preacher spelling
out the lesson of a parable, their president would repeat: Immigration.

As they slept—the bikers and the cops, Uncle Sam and the Statue of Liberty,
the millionaire on his magic pillow—adolescents from Guatemala scalded
the killing floors at the slaughterhouse in Grand Island, Nebraska, their hoses
like snakes spewing rivers that bubbled in the steam. Around them, the blades
of skull splitters and bone saws waited for their fingers to slip, fangs lurking
in the murk of early morning, in the daze behind the goggles on the faces
of adolescents from Guatemala, sleeping the next day at Walnut Middle School,
shaken awake by teachers who spotted the acid burns on their hands.