Hate Has No Restricted Zone

Coffeeshop in which you write is across
the street from where, so many nights, five years
you unbutton a white Oxford and toss
it on a backlit stage. Five years of cheers
escaping father’s rage necessitates
you enter through a parking lot that hurts

post twenty years of pleated skirts. Law states
strip clubs cannot open where there’s a church.
Converse is not true, so these Christians rent

a building to scream at you, “Burn in hell.
Whore. Jezebel.” Epithets your parents

used for a body they abused you sell

to lock it safe inside a home your own.
Hate in this town has no restricted zone.

Statement

I had a poem brewing in my brain that dealt with geography as an aggressive state.  When I was stripping, which I did at first to escape abuse, a church rented the property across the street from…