December 20, 2016

cracks

I am trying to imagine how the 15-year-old girl got her legs
to climb that fence on the overpass. How she stood above
the New Jersey Turnpike's busy lanes, then aimed her body
south. So, too, am I twisting my mind around the wrist
of the young man pointing a pistol into the back of the diplomat
visiting his country, then pulling an irrevocable trigger. Or the ankle
of the driver in the seat of impending carnage, pressing the gas pedal down
to the crucial notch. Despair is not what I thought it was, a lovesick, festering ache.
No, this runs deeper in the cracks, where hope has fallen so silent
the sound of sirens feels almost like music.