Heart Mountain
An ode to the beautiful Heart Mountain dance and wedding hall, located in Wyoming.
What could be more romantic than a weekend at Heart Mountain, Wyoming?
The magestic backdrop towering over a dance hall,
built into the remains of a
WW2-era Japanese internment camp.
Recycling, they say, is good for Mother Earth.
What could not be repurposed was torn down;
fears of asbestos, they said.
Health risks, you know...
Like the plague scorching lungs, filling them with cancer,
the history of the complex is toxic;
stripped down to the bones.
White-washed and used as a place of celebration,
Auschwitz into a night club;
don't question the smoke-stained stacks,
the muddy bunks,
walls lined with wooden racks
floors a cesspool stew.
Oh would you look at how pretty the dance floor is!
Glittering disco balls and hardwood floors,
fairy lights and picnic tables,
candle-lit table cloths so pristine it's revolting.
VIP access to the booths and bottle service,
champagne at beck and call.
It's cocktail toasts and bridal parties;
It's Japanese children crying out for mama,
fingernails scratching wooden walls full of splinters,
cored and chewed down to the bone.
It's the beating heart of Heart Mountain.
650 barracks?
650 barrels of summer fun
paved over the screams, the blood, the sweat and filth,
the segregation;
prejudice, a nasty stain on the lungs like asbestos;
Ripped out root and stem and strewn to the wind.
Memorials tucked away neatly out back,
out of sight like vows in coat pockets;
Grooms' pretty handkerchiefs are hiding
the blood stains.
Right now, Mahmoud Khalil sits in an ICE detention facility in Louisiana,
for the crime of peaceful protest against genocide,
green card drowning in a sea of irrelevance.
Right now, Jessica Brösche is still locked in an ICE facility in San Diego,
for the crime of wanting to give her American friend a tattoo;
a week in solitary confinement and a month in prison.
The soot still rises from the chimneys, America.
The barracks still scar the children, America.
The tired, huddled masses, America,
your summer wedding parties dance on winter's corpses,
You bulldoze the impalletable,
Give a fresh coat of white to the bones,
your grandchildren naive as sulfuric snowflakes,
Souls black as the carbon choking lungs,
yearning to breathe free.
Keep dancing, dancing, dancing,
as they all
fall
down.