Everybody is doing trigger warnings now, so To Whom It May Concern, I hated God when my sister died. I didn’t know it was coming, but we were at the hospital in a private room for family, and our pastor was there, the one who baptized me, and he said Let us pray, and I kept my eyes open to watch everybody, but listened, and when he said Sometimes God has to take back his angels, I was smart enough to know, I was 14, that he was saying she was gone or going and I loathed him so much, he didn’t see the look on my face, that blazing anger blank heart f-you-forever look, but then my parents told us we were going to take her off life support, and I died then, and after they took away the machines we had solitude, family time the five of us, mom, dad, me, my brother, and my sister. Holding her body she was warm she wasn’t conscious but she could hear us I know it, then they opened the door for other family to say goodbye and I was hugging her back in her bed, my face against her face, my tears wetting her cheek it was flush and her wavy hair, I wanted to hold her forever I was hurting but felt selfish like other people wanted to say goodbye too so I let go, and her head kind of tilted to the side and I straightened it so I was a mess then goodbye goodbye we left there to clean the house for mourners to come.
Copyright © 2018 by CM Burroughs. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 11, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.
1
honey people murder mercy U.S.A.
the milkland turn to monsters teach
to kill to violate pull down destroy
the weakly freedom growing fruit
from being born
America
tomorrow yesterday rip rape
exacerbate despoil disfigure
crazy running threat the
deadly thrall
appall belief dispel
the wildlife burn the breast
the onward tongue
the outward hand
deform the normal rainy
riot sunshine shelter wreck
of darkness derogate
delimit blank
explode deprive
assassinate and batten up
like bullets fatten up
the raving greed
reactivate a springtime
terrorizing
death by men by more
than you or I can
STOP
2
They sleep who know a regulated place
or pulse or tide or changing sky
according to some universal
stage direction obvious
like shorewashed shells
we share an afternoon of mourning
in between no next predictable
except for wild reversal hearse rehearsal
bleach the blacklong lunging
ritual of fright insanity and more
deplorable abortion
more and
more
From We're On: A June Jordan Reader. Copyright © 2017 by the June M. Jordan Literary Estate. Used by permission. www.junejordan.com.