Kathryn Kulpa
Your Life as a Balloon
Your silence will not protect you.
-Audre Lorde
Your whiteness will not save you.
Being Anglo will not save you. Being born in America will not save you.
Living in a middle-class neighborhood will not save you.
Being a woman will not save you.
Don’t make me laugh.
When has being a woman ever protected anyone?
Being old will not save you.
Being young will not save you.
Being a child, walking down the street
sipping an iced tea
being disabled, mentally ill,
pleading for your life
will not keep their bullets from ending you.
Marching the streets,
standing up for your neighbors’ right to exist
will not save you.
Lying asleep, at home,
blameless, in your bed
will not keep their fists
from pounding at your door.
Putting your hands up will not save you.
Your Midwestern smile no umbrella.
Being cis will not save you.
Being het will not save you.
Being married will not save you.
Being a father will not save you.
Being a mother will not save you.
Maybe all of this is a good thing.
Give up your privilege.
We are all just brains
tethered to flimsy bodies, short-term tenants.
Maybe you will be a candle on the side of a road
where something terrible once occurred.
Maybe you will be a name
written on a wall.
Your life is a balloon whose strings
anyone can cut.
Untethered
You can paint the sky.
Kathryn Kulpa lives in New England. Sometimes she writes poems on the side of the road. She is the author of For Every Tower, a Princess (Porkbelly Press) and A Map of Lost Places (Gold Line Press) and has stories in Claudine, Flash the Court, Ghost Parachute, Matchbook, Okay Donkey, and trampset. She would stay up all night reading if you let her.
Banner Art:
Sam Shere, The Hindenburg Disaster, 6 May 1937, Wikimedia Commons
