Read by the author.
There was a protest outside Thomas Jefferson
and children were lying down histrionically,
pretending the blast had killed them,
or radiation, or nuclear darkness, closing their eyes
no doubt to better picture it, and I took my place
among them gingerly: let that searing asphalt
ruin my jeans, not scorch my wrist—
but my father looked down from his office tower
and said, “That’s my son, there,
in the ranks of the dead”—when the police came
and began swinging clubs, giving free rein
to their prancing horses, my father’s eyes
narrowed and he said, “It’s over, some are running,
some willing themselves to be even more dead,
some hiding in each other’s arms”—gas cannisters
flew and my father said, “That was long ago,
that war never came, when he opened his eyes
my son found himself in his lover’s arms”—
“All around him the city as it once was,
ranked tenements, laundry like sails on roofs,
elms gray from coal smoke, but the sticks
keep falling, and all around the great horses
step daintily, afraid to trample the human body.”