American Girl | Philip Granof
My daughter’s face
should be on Mount Rushmore.
Just remove one of the slave owners.
Easy.
A good sculptor
could work with that.
Why, you ask?
It’s not because
she’s already made of granite.
Don’t tell her I said that.
It’s not because
she’s chosen to say fuck you
to a system built by people
who look like me—
although that’s a good one.
It’s not because she risked
waking me up at 2 am to let me
know she was on HRT,
uncertain her Dad would still love her.
I do
more than she could know.
Rather,
it’s her waking up everyday
having breakfast,
grocery shopping,
taking the T,
going to beauty school,
knowing there are those
that would see her dead
for using the bathroom
or her pronouns
or changing her passport.
So move over you crusty moth-eaten ghosts.
(Abraham, you can stay. You know why. We won’t tell)
There’s a new face of America.
Wait ‘till you see her smile.
Philip Granof was born in Hollywood, California — in what is now the painted blue Church of Scientology's world headquarters — and grew up in the San Fernando Valley. He lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, and performs regularly at the Cantab Lounge and the Lizard Lounge in Cambridge. He brings to his poetry what only thirty-five years in corporate America can: an eye for the absurd and an ear for the elegiac.