A previous reader’s PC outrage
annotates this edition of Huck Finn.
The word “RACIST,” scrawled across every page
in red pencil, wends its way from margin
to margin, trying to rouse the type—straight
as a company of Confederates—
to lay down weapons and emancipate
the word “nigger,” typeset by bayonets.
It wants, that cry of racism, to spear
marching rows of imperialist text,
to stone, bottle, and rain on riot gear,
exhume and lynch dead white Twains by their necks.
But if we excise all the books that prick
how will Shylock bleed and prove anemic?
From: https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/five-sonnets-summer-storage-high-school-book-room
Date: 2013
By: Jason Guriel (1978- )