All day I am prodded, all night I am probed. My skirt is lifted, my flower dissected. My silver ransacked without permission. Each day I am learning to live in a town built on the bones of the enslaved. I gasp awake in a country birthed from one terrible wound and then another, and I am unable to ignore America’s own red lineage. Here, no tree is ever just a tree. Here, every rolling field has been nursed on stolen sweat, every green acre sprung from blood.
