Poetry by Charlie Zender

1

"Ethnic Cleansing"
for Kosovo
Reporters pronounce "ethnic cleansing" with dumb determination Their nimble tongues thicken, stung by that prickly twain Civilized palaver undoes the sick scent of cadavers Which dislodge inferior complexes and awaken recriminations Words which barely knew eachother, wed at gunpoint Balk on lips, then shatter death's dignity with understatement The bride "Cleansing" scours the free air, hesitant to arrive Tripping into cold arms, embracing a hushed, attentive room Quieted by her mysterious, surly groom, "Ethnic" Whose checkered past shows through careworn seams of American history A Southern European who sweated our dirty, brackish, chores Who gladly clocked overtime to support how many? Dozens? of colorful relatives Hidden in ghetto tenements, wasting in some poor, once proud, homeland Becoming long corrugated Afros defiantly hunted down by white-collared society With Reagan imperially presiding while Mandela languishes in jail, Ethnic's motley faces peer from righteous T-shirts into our hearts, our checkbooks He conjures spicy food onto oily paper plates in buzzing Central Park stalls Keith Haring softened him in thick-brushed expressive cartoons Which make white flight from urban color look paranoid, like chocolate-phobia Like running from the Stay-Puff Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters This servant desperately tries all slippers, even Bruno Magli loafers Rehabilitation is name-branded Nikes dancing rich in three point land Now "cleansing" suffocates "ethnic" like "cancer" eradicates "breast"

Boulder, Colorado April, 1999
Poetry c Charlie Zender. Anthology at http://dust.ess.uci.edu/poetry Verbatim copying permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.