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Quakers rejected all clergy…believing that all of life is a sacrament and all believers are priests. They refused to take oaths, because you should always speak the truth…and they refused to take part in war.
— “The Sloopers of 1825,” Vesterheim Museum

Because I needed to I loved being a slooper, every time
I looked up a blue heron flew over, a military parade
in the alleyway, pedaling westward into headwinds,
searching for the short bus border patrol questioned,
emptied, and left idling on the shoulder before sunrise
this morning. Because I needed to be loved I considered
meeting a man in a Homegoods parking lot, citing sources
to his horse face. Soon forgotten bleachers border corn fields,
little free library filled with soup, I sloop through empty cross-roads,
past farm stands and dead ends, hollies always promising to hock,  
brown thrasher in the front grill of the gleaming pick-up,
mud-swallows absolutely bombing me in Orleans County,
where the Quakers sailed their puny sloop from Norway
to New York City, thumbed it up to Albany, and bladed down
the frozen Canal days after it opened on stolen ice skates,
all to live twenty to a barn in Kendall, New York on land
not nearly worth what they’d paid for. And being denied
refuge, the sloopers rebuked the Christians, heckled them
in their churches, though today we have a great feelings
for the farmer, for the yeomen, great feeling for the land
the settlers called “difficult of improvement” while the Seneca
laugh and to this very minute practice their patience, waiting
for our sovereign noses to be cut from our arrogant faces. Because
I needed to I loved the VP on TV telling me the H1-B Visas
took my home, beat my offer, appeared in my apartment
with dinner spoons—no I’ve seen the containers they sleep in,
slooping down the edges of the fields on my two wheels,
en route to the internet where the yesman says the green water
is blue, those cheers aren’t boos, there’s monsters on the moon,
as I sloop through Orleans County, denied entry to the country club
where my elected announces 2,000 new housing units in Occupied
Jerusalem. Bed pillows strewn in the yellow middle of the road—
                                                                                                       who’s heads indented those?

Tyler Barton is a writer, educator, and arts administrator living in Hamlin, NY. He's the author of Eternal Night at the Nature Museum and The Quiet Part Loud. His work has been awarded the Pushcart Prize, among other honors. He is the Artistic Director of Writers & Books in Rochester, NY. Learn more at tsbarton.com