A letter to Congress on July 4th

Dear Congress,

My name is Greg Marzullo. I am a 39 year-old gay man, and I’m writing to you from the American front.

Corpses litter the ground around me. Those who aren’t dead are crippled in both body and mind. Children are slaughtered. People of color lie bleeding from wounds never healed. Women, victimized by brutal men, scream in the streets.

And my people, or at least the ones I feel I have a right to claim, have been savaged by violence again. LGBTQ citizens of this country, which allegedly grants them certain inalienable rights, have been, most recently, mown down in an anti-gay hate crime at a nightclub.

Time is brief, and in this gun-toting America, it’s getting shorter by the hour. Before I, too, become a name to be read at a candlelit memorial, I feel I must remind you not of your duties, for those seem long forgotten, but of the very people you’ve stepped on during your ascent to the podium.

We, the people.

People who are black.
People who are brown.
People who are mixed.
People who are women.
People who are men.
People who are both.
People who are queer.
People who are poor.
People in the projects.
People in the sticks.
People under bridges.
People drowned in fear.
People seared by grief.
People burn enraged.

We, the people
do not expect you to stand up for us,
because you haven’t.
And you don’t.
And you need to.
And I wish you would.

Because we’re dying out here.

While you sit in the hallowed halls of Congress and debate the importance of state birds and dead-end inquiries into Benghazi, we’re being butchered. You spend millions of our money on programs to “keep America safe,” but America hasn’t been safe for some time. A political bait-and-switch, you rile up the masses with ghosts conjured from beyond our borders, but we, the people, know where the real terror lies.

In our streets,
In our clubs,
In our schools,
In our churches,
In the day-to-day lives
you have forgotten;

Politicians enflamed with lust
for the soured honorific of “Congressman,”
you vote against we,
the people, because you are not
of the people.

I want you to read my letter from the battlefield that America has become, scrawled lines of prose and poetry tossed off in the light of fire, because, as I lay dying, I want you to know you’ve defiled your office, the country and all of us.

Sincerely,

Greg Marzullo