I love America. There. I said it.
No sparkler. No flyover.
No Juicy Lucy from Matt’s Bar either,
with its molten cheese hiding in the middle
to burn anybody who bites in a hurry,
which, now that I say it out loud,
might be this whole poem in a bun.

But I can show my work.

I love the America
where my kids leave their bikes collapsed in the backyard grass,
front wheels still ticking like they fainted
at the news that dinner was ready.

Where three houses down somebody is grilling with purpose,
and for one minute the whole block smells
like everyone has a dad,
and the dad came home,
and the dad knows exactly how his babies like their burgers.

I love standing in line at the Midtown Market where ahead of me
a Somali grandmother buys cilantro by the armful,
and in front of her
a Lutheran grandmother is buying cream-of-mushroom soup by the case.
Two worlds riding in on the same conveyor belt.

I love the barber in Richfield
who pumps the chair down for a foster kid like he’s lowering a throne,
snaps the paper collar around his neck like a medal,
then tilts his chin toward the mirror and asks,
“How’s that look, young man?”
Not because the haircut is finished,
but because somebody should ask that boy how he wants to be seen.

I love lemonade stands run with catastrophic accounting practices,
where the CFO is missing both front teeth,
the head of marketing is asleep in the grass,
and nobody understands the situationship
between revenue and inventory.

I love public libraries where you can walk into a story and out of the rain,
and Little League fields where a seven-year-old at second base
is building a small civilization in the infield dirt
while his parents scream helpful things about focus.

I love water towers that wear the town’s name
with the confidence of LaMelo Ball,
despite the town containing one Dairy Queen,
two stoplights,
and a passive-aggressive schism at the Baptist church off Main
over the color of the lobby’s new carpet.

And there’s more.

County fairs.
Butter heads of dairy princesses turning slowly in their refrigerated glass like saints.
A taxidermied black bear in wraparound sunglasses outside a bait shop up north, guarding the nightcrawlers like he’s been deputized.

That stretch of 35 just past Albert Lea
where the Twins game dissolves into static
and the silence goes back to the corn.

I love America.
That’s twice, if you’re keeping score,
and you are.

This is America.

Which is why, when I see somebody stand up at a rally to object,
one person, one sentence, a voice that cracks a little on the way out,
and the crowd answers with USA! USA! USA!
the way you turn the radio up,
my heart does what your foot does in the dark
when it comes down for a stair that isn’t there.

Because I recognize that move.
Guys, I have kids.

That’s fingers in the ears.
That’s la-la-la, I can’t hear you,
except everyone here is a grown adult who drove
and will be trusted, later, to merge.
It’s the geopolitical equivalent of “because I said so.”

I know how this looks.
I just spent half a poem writing this country a love song,
and now I’m wincing at what most folks consider the chorus.

But to be clear, my beef isn’t with the joy.
Cheer for the hockey teams that brought home gold
and left their teeth on the ice like a tip.
Cheer for the gymnast who sticks the landing
so the rest of us can finally exhale
with our completely unearned sense of accomplishment.

We did it.
We, on the couch, with the dip.
We, who have not touched our toes since Blockbuster and Camp Snoopy closed.

These are all excellent reasons to spill a beer.
This is perfectly acceptable stadium behavior.

But stuff a whole country inside that noise
and you get a patriotism so weak it needs two locker rooms,
one scoreboard,
and somebody else’s grief to verify our joy.

That’s where you lose me.
When we take the childish architecture of fandom,
the face paint, the foam finger,
the shirtless guy in January glowing like a ham,
and mistake it for citizenship.

Leave that at the game. Shout it with mustard on your chin.

Because there’s already a grammar to that chant:
the subject is us,
the object is them,
and the verb is crush.

You could diagram it on a napkin.
Just don’t try to conjugate a country that way.

Because a nation is not the Vikings.
No country could survive that many Januarys.

A nation is that same backyard three houses down,
where the grill’s been cold since Thursday
when ICE came for the dad while the morning was still dark.

A nation is the Marine missing three fingers,
pinning a childproof bottle between his knees and using his teeth
to open the thing the country prescribed for the pain the country gave.

A nation is the woman cleaning the stadium
after everybody who chanted USA has gone home,
on her knees beneath Section 114
collecting our plastic cups and chicken bones
and one foam finger still pointing at nothing,
for barely enough money to live inside the country
we just finished congratulating ourselves for loving.

She isn’t cleaning up after America.
She is America.

Because America isn’t a mascot.
America is a promise.

And a promise has no visiting team.

A promise,
as anyone who has ever been married,
or sober,
or forgiven,
or forgiven again can tell you,
doesn’t become sacred when we make it loud.

It only becomes sacred when it’s annoying and inconvenient
and we decide to keep it anyway.

It’s a more adult kind of love.
The kind you need the night your child looks you dead in the face and lies.
You don’t spare the child and defend the lie.
You don’t spare the lie and lose the child.
You turn on the kitchen light.
You pull a stool twelve inches from yours.
You set what happened on the table,
between your pride and your grief,
right next to the salt, and you say:

Nothing you tell me will make you any less mine.
So go ahead. Tell it all.

In this sweaty, all-caps moment before the moment,
I’m tired of us confusing devotion with applause,
as though the highest form of love
were refusing to notice the blood on the shirt.
As though pointing at the wound were the wounding.
As though the doctor is a traitor
for holding the X-ray up to the light and saying, “This is infected.”

If your love can’t survive a hard diagnosis, it isn’t love.
It’s public relations.

I don’t want an America whose feelings I have to protect from the truth.
I want an America whose promises I have to protect from our fear.
I don’t want a country I’m forbidden to disappoint.
I want one I’m obligated to repair,
with a borrowed drill and the wrong size screws
and my kid holding the flashlight on everything but the problem.

Give me a patriotism that knows how to blush.

That can stand at a graveyard,
or a reservation,
or a slave cabin,
or a school desk with a name still taped to the corner
and nobody coming back to sit in it,
and resist that almost narcotic human urge to explain.

That kind of patriotism that can be an adult and say:

Yes.
We did this. This is ours too.

And then stay.

Give me a patriotism that widens the we one folding chair at a time,
until nobody is left standing at the edge of the table
watching freedom go cold on everybody else’s plate.

The opposite of loving America is not criticizing it.
The opposite of loving America is needing America to be innocent.

I don’t need that anymore. I put away those childish things.
I don’t need a perfect country.
I need a country capable of confession.

A country that can look down at its own enormous hands
and ask what they have built,
what they have broken,
who they have held,
who they have held under,
and how these same hands,
still enormous,
still trembling,
still ours,
might reach down
and pull somebody out.

So yes. For the third and final time: I love America.
How much, you ask?

Enough to refuse the penny-arcade patriotism
that paints its face and pounds its chest
and needs an enemy just to find its own pulse.

Enough to want more from it than winning.
Enough to believe the most American sound isn’t USA! USA! USA!
but chair legs scraping across a church-basement floor,
coats lifted off saved seats,
frightened people turning toward frightened people
like it’s time to pass the peace, and saying:

Here.
Sit.
You belong here too.


“I Love America”
24×24 Acrylic and Oil on Canvas