The hang glider sails out
over the concert goers
over the border
bringing death
Portrait of a family
three smoldering husks
in a burned-out car
their heads thrown back mouths open in
a perpetual scream
No Munch, no Goya
No Icarus falling
into Breughel’s sea
Not even Pinochet’s
airforce dropping prisoners
high over the
Pacific Skin pealing
from the backs of
Hiroshima’s dead
I can shut my eyes
but I cannot unsee
the horrors before me
before you before us
I had thought this was behind us
but I was wrong Men I have met
ordered the death of Lumumba
calmly as you order tea
the spectacle of the bullet
in Bin Laden’s brain
lacking only popcorn
in that theater at
the White House
So now a Secret
Service agent concedes
he found the second bullet
there was a second bullet
Oswald could never
have acted alone
Kennedy stares
up from the gurney
into a future
he'll never see we’ll
never see our
children’s children
will suffer unspeakably
The diplomat leaving the
consulate carrying
Khashoggi in a suitcase
parts is parts permits
a negotiation nobody much wants
five years hence, a deal
somebody else hopes to stop
hence the graceful silent
mechanical birds in the cloudless
air you cannot breathe
if you are burning alive
your flesh curdling crisping
the smell of your eyebrows
your hair your hands
Permit me to kiss you
on your burned-out lips
I can’t even tell your gender
it burns away as with dreams
loves, memories, unfinished
business that would still
make you anxious if only
you could remember
what it was to live on this planet
Ron Silliman [image credit: Didi Menendez] recently moved to Springfield, Pennsylvania after 28 years on the Main Line. He teaches at Penn. With Alison Fraser, Benjamin Friedlander and Jeffrey Jullich, he co-edited David Melnick's Nice: Collected Poems, just published by Nightboat Books.
the Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan
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