About Place Journal - On Freedom - Body Politic section header

Alexandra Teague

On Inauguration Day, which is also MLK Day, I Consider America as a “Mouse Pie”

“I really couldn’t, couldn’t eat a mouse pie. And I shall have to eat it, because it is a party.”
— Beatrix Potter

This country couldn’t, really couldn’t, spell freedom

with a q, yet here we go again. Quietly quaking. Killing

loudly. Spelling birthright like never here. This country

couldn’t, really couldn’t split the pie into unpieful slices:

give everyone an extra scoop of ice cream, keep cutting

til the berries gush. The berries couldn’t be more beautiful,

more plentiful, more picked by immigrants paid to never tell

their real brambled stories in a language where truth thrums

mouthy and luscious as a pie buffet. A pie parade. This country

couldn’t throw one, couldn’t give itself crustless. Couldn’t love

the hedonistic pie plate, the pucker where the crimping gaps

slutty and slovenly as a book in clear, ripped library plastic—

anyone can touch it—anyone can judge what the words mean.

Freedom’s just another word for; freedom spelled with a silent free.

This country couldn’t spell worth a damn from the start. Kept

abbreviating woman as man, kept abbreviating pie as I, kept creating

pies out of appleappleappleappleappleappleapple ladening the tree

like hard red clouds, like a pie storm (all worm and snake and

fairytale chomping on its own dark tail, instead of something more

like manna, like enough, like knives were made for licking off

the juice and letting it dangerously dribble, then licking off a lover’s

mouth until who knows what the fruit is, and who cares). This country

couldn’t not care or couldn’t care or couldn’t tell the difference—

couldn’t clean the plate or let its hate turn soft as butter between

human fingers’ rub, or it could, but who would walk with the blue-

ribbon prize, the mousetrap of the wallet stuffed? This country

could sing a different song than blackbirds, sixpence, pie plates,

crumbs and ovens. Could bake itself silly and satiated, generous

as filling spilling down the oven rack. Could bubble and drip

and let living mice riffle whiskers in the sweet, sticky sludge.

Could bake flour-butter-salt-sugar-water to a more perfect

union til everyone lifts pieces out with only fingers, then licks

those fingers like a dog licks where a rabbit’s been after it’s wriggled

through a fence that’s lattice like a crust for the pie of yard—because

who says there’s only this pie or that pie, or pie on the moon; there’s

starry-earthy pie for all and whiskey shots scorchy enough to keep

the sugar honest. And freedom is spelled (could be, could be):

here’s to handed-down recipes with handwritten notes that improve them:

it’s mousse pie, not mouse pie; add more cream to the filling; add

more filling to the cream, run your tongue down the beaters; let yourself

love what MLK called “this garment of destiny.” He meant,

whatever hurts one, hurts everyone. He meant, we’re all in the pie.

While the U.S. President Throws A Military Parade, I Stand in Front of El embarque en el arca de Noé

Michiel Coxcie (1499-1592), Coleción de Patrimonio Nacional, Madrid

What must the painter have thought when the birds,

despite all parables and paint, began refusing

their pairings—their bright/dull dichotomies—when they refused

not to skim toward the edges of the canvas with their soft grey-

golden-blue-black anvil wings; when they refused—

even as Noah’s hand commanded—the clasp of ark

because the waters would surely never rise that far—

or if the waters rose that far, the ark would be gone,

and they’d remain above, cawing and crying and chirping

in disordered beauty: stork by stark red parrot, swift

by swallows by gulls by pelicans. Did he try, as he lashed

down rain in the east, to restrain them? To paint the horizon

as it was meant to be: divided—a flat, wrought line

with GOD above like an integer, as each other creature was

divided from all but one of itself? The vicuñas prancing

the narrow ramp in hoofed obedience—gangplank

to heaven, gangplank to cage—the lions with their

ruffled, comic faces, the rhinoceroses’ horn-tipped reverence,

the horses stepping two-by-two like troopless troops

decreed by He who had claimed the ledgers, the accounts,

the X of all X’s, the Very Big Force: the Rain Rain Rain—as the birds

swirled and dived like a spilled cornucopia as the birds stole

the eye away from order, as the birds cried, Look: an inundation

of air! sweeping from the painter’s brush like a ruffling tornado, v’ing toward mountains

(Why not just build aeries?), refusing the tidy seven pairs

they’d always been allotted. Who—says the birds—do you think you are

with all this thunder? Who first posed as the models for angels?

Yes, it will rain and rain and rain and rain and

fish will rise up, shining and fat with kelp and sea lettuce. Clams will grow

like drunk flowers. We’ll blur in our shapes—as already, some of us slip

in the distance from swans into something like heart-tridents, butterfly-

owls that hover and plummet—like the sun turns from circle to cone

to a burning stepped pyramid to green-red molten glass

each night as it crashes (there is nothing to fear here)

into the million ancient rainstorms of the ocean.

Lonestar State

It’s true I’ve never ridden a mechanical bull, although in Texas in the 1980s, they were the official state animal, and everyone who didn’t arrive at the pinch-toed, penny-loafered private school in a Mercedes Driving-Miss-Daisy-chauffeured was required to arrive on bucking fiberglass bolted to lower-middle-class like a badly-welded Piggly Wiggly cart, squeaking and kicking one wheel back, petulant in the cereal aisle; the inanimate world not inanimate at all, but animated by money we didn’t have—you know this already; we were the ones in sandals at the Tandy ice-rink edge as people circled imported winter on delicate blades. So to get to that school with invisible gates, that school named Country Day, like a country club, where most kids had a smarter father-mother-older-brother, generational wealth making up for test scores (the future’s SAT scandals still in Fabergé embryo), I had to pin myself to a bull’s stiff electric back, clutch its horns like Kevin Costner clutched his floodlit dream in that movie: we could all reach anything! (though some of us rode to school in Oldsmobiles with one black door though the car was green): the slickness and danger just part of the fun, the long-horned capitalism: Reagan’s ride-a-bull-to school, as people maybe had on the frontier everyone pretended to be descended from, deep in the heart of our starry, clap-clap-clap state. How—you ask—did I ever slip through that school’s gateless gate if I didn’t know the secret: lean forward, grip your dominant hand hard, sit up straight—like most American rules, a little contradictory: straight and forward, and up and down, and if, it’s true, I was afraid, a counterfeit cowgirl, lassoless, loaferless, penniless (read: summer ranchless), though the Stockyard bulls in my barrio snorted hotly at their steakhouse futures; my family’s vegetarianism illegal too in 1980s Texas, where each child had to butcher a Longhorn like frog dissection in other (smaller) states. And how, you ask, in this world, did I not starve in a dust storm; not break my neck like a drunk in a honkytonk; not lose my mind like Letty in The Wind, that 1920s silent film where sand blows endlessly through slat walls of West Texas: wind so powerful it appears as rearing horses she can see above her in the sky? Did I say I didn’t—that I don’t some days feel cloud-kicked: fallen from something I never learned to ride?

Alexandra Teague is most recently the author of the poetry collection [ominous music intensifying] (Persea 2024) and the memoir Spinning Tea Cups (Oregon State University Press 2023). She is previously the author of three books of poetry and a novel, as well as co-editor of Bullets into Bells: Poets & Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. A former recipient of fellowships from Civitella Ranieri and the NEA, she is a professor and chair of English at University of Idaho.

@alexandra.teague
https://www.alexandrateague.com

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