F.I. Goldhaber

GET OUT

Get out while you still can, they scream.

But where am I supposed to go?
Even the purple state I live
in provides no refuge from threats.
I can't escape fascists willing
to kill me for being queer; white
supremacists who find my choice
of pronouns problematic; the
anti-Semitic Zionists;
xtian nationalists who have
targeted me all my life for
refusing to embrace someone
whose teachings they ignore; anti-
masking/vaxxing terrorists to
whom my life is worth less than brunch
reservations, concert tickets.

Where in the world can I go to
escape Nazis, bigots, and the
deadliest of them all, climate
catastrophe? One pandemic
never ended, more keep starting
as public health is tossed in the
garbage can of austerity
politics and every day
around the world refugees are
turned away, drowned, sent back home to
die, just as my kin were in the
nineteen thirties. I'm privileged
enough, unlike many, to have
a passport and resources. But
even so, travel is not safe
especially for anyone
disabled or chronically ill.

No matter, where else could I go?


F.I.'s YouTube reading of "Get Out"


F.I. confesses: "Many of us warned that the reactionary, right-wing SCOTUS would reverse decades of civil rights progress. Few believed us. When Roe was overturned and we noted that was just a first step, they scoffed. Now the only -- utterly impractical for many, impossible for most -- solution they offered is to leave?"

F.I. GOLDHABER's words capture people, places, and politics with a photographer's eye and a poet's soul. As a reporter, editor, business writer, and marketing communications consultant, they produced news stories, feature articles, editorial columns, and reviews for newspapers, corporations, governments, and non-profits in five states. Now paper, plastic, electronic, and audio magazines, books, newspapers, calendars, broadsides, and street signs display their poetry, fiction, and essays. More than 240 of their poems appear in almost 90 publications including What Color is Your Privilege? their political poetry collection published by Left Fork press. http://www.goldhaber.net/