All Dressed Up, Nowhere to Go
Published in
Mar 31, 2021
Compressed to diamond hardness minus the clarity
at the bottom of a steaming garbage mountain in Rio,
beneath the ashes of a Rohingya refugee fire,
in the larynx of a crushed throat,
upon the throes of a death spiral,
screaming for deliverance in a Guantánamo cell,
on the walls of Guernica’s splattered war paint,
lurking between the letters of a conspiracy mash note,
blackened by the mind’s eye where no one listens in,
rotting in the stockyards tended by junkyard dogs,
engraved by goose quill on moth-eaten parchment,
abandoned at birth, death, in between,
perching on a pillow of bitter cement —
stories stolen, swollen, swallowed whole,
leaving us in fragments like scraps of papyrus
languishing inside a tomb.
