For the Record
George Washington never said I cannot tell a lie
hatchet gory with cherries in his child hands.
It was pretty foolish for Bill Clinton to say Lincoln
said, you can fool some of the people all of the time
& all of the people some of the time & by the way,
some of those people think Einstein defined insanity
as doing the same thing over & over again & expecting
different results, when actually, Rita Mae Brown likely
coined it. I’d bet $20 that Jackson never cared too much
about seeing the whites of eyes before he fired. Because,
let’s be honest, all great Neptune’s ocean could not
wash the blood clean from his hand. Literally,
it’s true walk softly & carry a big stick originated
an African proverb & TR racked it up like so many
game animals, tucked it in his tally of 296 kills
along with 9 lions, 8 elephants & 15 common zebras.
Even though, admittedly, he had not professionally dealt in truth,
Twain didn’t really say that a lie can travel halfway
around the world while the truth is putting its shoes on.
Thomas Jefferson never said it either,
neither did Churchill, who also didn’t say, if you’re going
through hell, keep going or history will be kind to me
for I intend to write it, though I’d guess by writing,
he wouldn’t have meant bumper stickers or refrigerator magnets
positioned neatly beside Buddha saying, the mind is everything.
What you think, you become, when he actually said, Whatever
a monk keeps pursuing with his thinking & pondering,
that becomes the inclination of his awareness, supposedly.
Bridget Kriner (she/her) is a community college professor in Cleveland Ohio. Her work has appeared in Rattle (Poets Respond), Book of Matches, Shelia-Na-Gig, Whiskey Island and Split this Rock, where she won First Place in the Abortion Rights Poetry Contest in 2012. In her spare time, she enjoys hate-watching romance reality shows and sentimental primetime dramas. She has worked as a barista, bartender, abortion clinic patient advocate, union organizer, and fair housing tester.
The Marbled Sigh 