These things collect, 
                          my nervous system 
            ringing sounds of a too busy brain, 
hollow silences from Africa to here, across 
water slapping up the bay to where the capitol  
was set in stone now being ground into sand. 

A bird finds the nest inside me, flutters 
into the solar plexus, and I think of the sun, 
fire and hearts, what lives inside the character

                                   ⽕   
for fire as we interrogate grief. I question 
tree branches weighed down with snow 
melting until the bending branches soften 
against protests of the dead, in the middle, 
the heart’s mind above the rootedness. 

                                    At night I name 
            the cacophony of being broken—
alcohol, heroin, cocaine, all the poison poured 
into all the jagged places claiming our hopes 
for children dying in this apocalypse, our sins 
haunting nameless birds flying back to be whole. 

            Sing now, children. You will be saved. 

—March 1, 2019