I don’t usually post original poems on my blog, but this is one I wrote in anticipation of my reading on July 18, 2024 at Fort Worden during the Port Townsend Writers Conference.
It was inspired by my walk across the campus after midnight while dragging an antique red wagon across the chunky dry fields and graveled roads to the campground where I was staying, and just how noisy it was.
It was also shaped by the major shifts in current events over the prior three weeks, following the Biden-Trump debate, leading to the assassination attempt on the former president, the stepping down of President Biden from the Democratic ballot, and the addition of Vice President Harris as the presumptive Democratic nominee.
Finally, it was energized by passionate discourse between myself and indigenous scholar Dawn Pichon-Barron at the conference following her powerful reading the night before about the deep concerns of women of color. Pichon-Barron is Academic Director of the Native Pathways Program and Creative Writing Faculty at the Evergreen State College.
I read “Radio Flyer” to open my launch party reading; later it was reprised as an encore to close out the conference’s evening open mics series that week.
Footnotes are for context.
RADIO FLYER
Girl pulling a red wagon, bump-draggin’
at midnight ‘cross the campus, the stars
her only reliable witness, the air a perfect
still life at Fahrenheit 65, the year she was
born. Still with that inscrutable smile,
no impulse to explain her mysteries, she
the acolyte of negative capability,¹ this girl
not even a girl unless age 59 qualifies.
The campground at the edge of the vortex²
hums quiet as a dead end but for the
brash rattle shatter of old rubber tires
agitating loose gravel and dry goldgrass.
She is the source of it: reverb of a dragon
dragging its muscular tail over a horde—
stolen ingots inscribed with the faces
of women and queerfolk, zombies and ghosts,
first ones³, in-patients, milk-carton kids…
The audacity! She laughs into that secret
smile, a mask leftover from childhood,
at the thrill of up-ending the impending.
Her errand wakes the dead, triggers
the image of the long-strewn molecules
of her John Bircher⁴ father reassembled
into a tulpa just to shame her. How dare
you?—his refrain. So she wonders briefly:
Is this hour unholy, ungodly? Angels
at midnight save lives: doctors, mothers,
poets. How could their work be less than
a white man’s comfort tucked into his RV
at a state park? Deer more tame than
dogs welcome her at a gate shielding
a circle of other wagons, where Gadsden
flags⁵ fly next to pinwheels, where sidewalk
chalk stories written in imperfect curlicues
give a state of the union: “The apocalypse
is coming.”⁶ Even and especially our children
channel these low frequencies—always have—
sounds, only ever felt, that shred the linings
of immature solar plexuses, block with bile
their fledgling throat chakras. Meanwhile,
thirty thousand women met in a Zoom⁷
prior to this inexplicable midnight stroll
of the girl with the red wagon—how dare
she?—to deconstruct the Gilead manifesto⁸
designed for bondage and to silence all
those uppity bitches, among them her
sisters, her daughters, her aunts. The next
day, she tapes invitations to a party to
the windows of the commons where
a gentleman loiters nearby. He narrows
one eye, gruffly warns: “Better not be no
propaganda.” She smiles full tooth
as she says it, with an ease reserved
for preachers sitting on righteous piles
of cash for the laundry, their forked tails
tucked as tightly as if in drag: “This book
is nothing if not propaganda.” His stunned
glare speaks of his brothers’⁹ pledges for
a New World detox of dangerous ideas:
bodily autonomy, access to books, freedom
to sleep, to say no, to be authentic. How
dare she? The girl now without the wagon
asks herself the question, tows herself
like a dragon in the bright light of day
‘cross this purple mountain campus
where the sigh of dead grass smells
sweet and foghorns lament the loss
of light. How dare she make a sound?
©Tamara Kaye Sellman at Fort Worden Park, July 17, 2024; all rights reserved.
- Phrase coined by John Keats to describe the poet’s ability to live with uncertainty and mystery. [Poets.org: https://poets.org/glossary/negative-capability]
- Port Townsend, WA is not only known for being a creative enclave but rumored to be an intersection of ley lines known as an energy vortex.
- Referencing indigenous people.
- My father was a practicing member of the John Birch Society, a right-wing political advocacy group from the mid-20th century which seems to be the birthplace of the modern MAGA cult. This New Yorker article describes its 21st century resurrection.
- Historian Heather Cox Richardson’s interview for the Red, Wine & Blue webinar exploring the details of Project 2025 drew unforeseen numbers of registrations and attendance in mid-July. Numbers updated (according to Red, Wine & Blue): more than 40,000 attended the online meeting, with 70,000 registering (presumably to watch later).
- Another name for Project 2025. Gilead is a pop culture reference to the fictitious town in The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood. Learn more.
- While Port Townsend is generally known for being a progressive-liberal community, it is surrounded by right-wing conservative and libertarian neighbors. Some of them belong to the anti-government militia group known as the Washington Three Percenters, currently under watch by the Southern Poverty Law Center. These “Threepers” organize truck rallies through the streets of PT or stand at the town’s edge along the highway waving flags and touting slogans that support MAGA-style fascism. I drove past them on my way home from PTWC and promptly flipped them the bird driving through their gauntlet because I’m the girl with the red wagon and I will dare to make noise. … WILL YOU?
