Twenty years ago, I took my daughter, Sara, to the ocean for her fourth birthday. She just learned to dog paddle, and proudly walked up to anyone in sight, saying, "I can swim." The sea was calm, so I ... [+]
Thomas Maluck is a teen services librarian and compulsive writer in South Carolina. His poetry has been published by Stepping Stone Press, South Carolina Poetry Initiative, Muddy Ford Press, and the State Libraries of Virginia and South Carolina, to name a few. His poem, "Libraries In The South," was the juried winner of poetry in Short Edition's America: color it in. Contest, summer 2020.
They are fighting in the library: whether or not to label classic books, the well-loved treasures of canon that don't know how to talk about non-white people without a white hero and minstrel show, and white people are so sorry for the trouble they never want to bring it up again. Outside, epithets are slurred and shouted from a white truck or SUV like a tribute to Selma, then speeding away, gone, quicker than a vote to keep gerrymandering. Such is life in the South, and everywhere is the South, where the song played loudest has no lyrics for sunset towns, Tulsa, or Juneteenth. Maybe discla