I have fretted
over not recalling my dreams 
until tonight
when I had one in which

two magazine-handsome white boys
laughed as they told me
they were going to steal the trailer
I was dragging up from the ditch
where it had rolled after detaching from the car
when I took that too-fast turn
up the hill;

this after I’d done all the work
of searching for it in the autumn brush
of the ruined industrial park
where it had rolled long ago
into near-invisibility
among the bittersweet
and wild grape vines
whose color almost matched
its rust and dents;

I had not yet decided how to use it
or even to scrap it or sell it but
I had had a small vision of it becoming 
the basis for a small side business to help me
survive, no clear plan really, just an inkling
that something this usable and abandoned
shouldn’t be left to rot;

so when the laughing little men
in polos and good jeans from some
ungodly expensive store laughed at me
and said they were going to take it, and what
could I do about it against them, and how did I think
this was going to end, I did not bother to ask them
why they were doing it;

they were doing it because they could, because 
they had money, because they had family to back them,
because they were whitely empowered, because nothing
had prepared them to hear no, to believe in no, 
to even understand no; this was just a game to them —
to steal the most broken thing they could from someone
as broken as the thing they were going to steal
and to laugh as they were doing it;

and as American
and as low-down
and as modern
as all this was,
as much as I wanted
to walk away
from the trailer and the boys
and maybe even my car
and go drop my shame
into the nearby river
and drown with their laughter
in my dying ears,

I could not.

The knife from my pocket
was now in my strong hand.
The pepper gel from my pocket
was now in my other hand.
I had enough, enough, and I sprayed first
intending to slash right after —

and then I woke up
wringing wet, lying with the covers
kicked off as if this were still
the Fourth Of July, as if this were still
August the sixteenth

when it was still warm in the outside world,
when I wasn’t yet fighting for scraps,
when it seemed like I might yet win.