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Another school shooting,
the same procession of strangers, pressing
half-wilted bouquets against
the chain link playground fence, the same
stunned looks and friends' disclaimers,
the same non sequiturs:
He was going in the Navy.
He had a tattoo. He wouldn't hurt a fly.
He sits in juvie somewhere,
Boulder, Sacramento,
some half-horse town in Arizona,
his head hanging, his hands caught
between his knees, fingers locked,
his mind in a sixty-cycle hum,
not praying, certainly not imagining
last year's census which under-counted
those roomless citizens gathered in
the angles of cities like dirt in an elbow crease.
A boy, maybe considering fighting,
maybe masturbating,
not concerned with about politics at all,
not even thinking of the girl who went down
in a tangle of brown hair and plaid,
not her blood, not the relief, a boy
thinking about insults, a
bout the turn down, about guns,
the heft of them, their slick,
metallic smell, the warm stock
nestled against his shoulder,
the kick of that shotgun on his arm.
Before first light a heart can rise out of the sweaty body
follow the morning into another room, escape an encircling arm.
Before the earliest hungers dawn, a heart can
withdraw, as the sun licks the window pink, as the body wakes
and turns to that different breathing. Any heart can
do this, without stir or rustle in the quiet
before the coffee maker. Every day, someone's heart bursts
or clogs or flutters, slips away while a plane
tilts into its journey. And why not?
In a fit, Grandmother's white hair flew out against the pillow.
I held my breath and learned how death was done.
Afterward, it could never come too soon.
Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives in East Texas with her husband, two cats and a dog who once chewed rugs. She has published both in print and on-line at sites like Riding the Meridian, Poetry Magazine.com, Conspire, The Astrophysist's Tango Partner Speaks, A Writer's Choice Literary Journal, 2River, Tinturn Abbey, Sarasvatzine, The Salt River Review, Mystic River Review, Gravity, Zuzu's Petals, and The Texas Observer. Her book, Reading Berryman to the Dog, is available from Jacaranda Press.