These mornings, I could mistake your sutured
shadows of sunrise for the fists of another fire.
The bridges, once hovering over the minnowed river,
now sunken into a tapestry of flames. Water. Fire.
Earth, the imprints of bootstep staggered like
a graveyard. Air, the horizon coloring itself into
the wilt of my father’s ashes. Richmond, in years,
they’ll immobilize us into history textbooks,
black-and-white snapshots of an anonymous family,
a polychromatic film we’ll never watch. Confederacy,
treachery. Richmond, in this divided country, we’ll
multiply the death toll by three each day, subtract
neighborhoods from the population, add epitaphs to
an inventory for the ages. We’ll wake into the
world where every poem bloodies into another
battlefield. Listen as they split into stanzas of smoke
and setback, the grammar of war always built
on clauses of purpose. As we raise rifles to the
sky like a hunch. As a generation of bullets
immigrates through the land. As somewhere,
another neighborhood sputters to the ground,
stone house walls creasing into each other like gravity.
Patrick Tong is a student from the greater Chicago area.
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