Fear

Kathryn Jones

October 30, 2020

Fear 

of the other

the different

the known dangers

the unknown lurking

the invisible enemy everywhere on

doorknobs, toilet seats, hands, lips, in 

the café, the church, the store, the voting booth

Fear

of the red 

the blue

brown eyes

foreign accents 

the news, fake or not 

speeches, tweets, videos, emails 

the tsunami building, sucking water from the shore 

Fear

sown

invented

manufactured

packaged like PR

delivered to the demographic

broadcast on all channels to everyone

repeated until the messages pile into a mountain 

Fear

lies

crushes hope

creates a false narrative 

is the path to the Dark Side

is the opposite of freedom and joy

stands for False Evidence Appearing Real

is the true enemy of the people. Vote it out now.

Kathryn Jones is a journalist, essayist, author, and poet. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Texas Monthly, and in the anthologies A Uniquely American Epic: Intimacy and Action, Tenderness and Action in Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (University Press of Kentucky, 2019) and Pickers and Poets: The Ruthlessly Poetic Singer-Songwriters of Texas (Texas A&M University Press, 2016). Her poetry has been published on tejacovido.com, in the Langdon Review of the Arts in Texas, and in the upcoming Odes and Elegies: Eco-Poetry from the Texas Gulf Coast (Lamar University Press). She is finishing a biography of Ben Johnson, the Academy Award-winning actor and world champion rodeo cowboy, to be published by the University Press of Mississippi. She was inducted into the Texas Institute of Letters in 2016.