Lisa Folkmire | I’ve mistaken my whiteness for my being when it’s actually a condition | Poets Resist

Lisa Folkmire is a poet from Warren, Michigan. She holds an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts where she studied poetry. Her poems have appeared in many journals, including Heron Tree Literary Arts Journal, Gravel, Atlas & Alice, Timber, and Ann Arbor Current Magazine. She is also a reader for The Masters Review.

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Also by Lisa Folkmire: Floral Dark Suburbia Dearest

Poets Resist
Edited by Cody Stetzel
August 19, 2018

Lisa Folkmire

I’ve mistaken my whiteness for my being
when it’s actually a condition

My sister and I can wander along strands of city lights three glasses in the crowd parting ways as we stare down at our feet days of being seen as sacred Virgin Marys Mothers of Gods the most dangerous of all to be kept holy in a time of unrest the power we have is larger than the fear of being chased days and nights followed by men with beers and whiskey and wants these nights are shared by other women I’ve been mistaken thinking that birds are older than us spanning from 70-100 years instead of 10-15 how else do they get to know when to scavenge and when to wait maybe it comes from the scavenging, the pecking at what is found rather than what is given that makes them seem so much older there’s nothing much more dangerous than a white woman pointing her finger taking aim, a white man holding a gun calling an albatross an albatross, calling a seagull a saint.