as has been predicted
we are down on all fours
eating sand — smooth

pink, hard graveled, 
laden with plastic and glass,
oil-caked: whatever we find

we swallow because we must
eat or die. we are down on all fours
drinking sewage or other foulness

because all we have left is foulness.
drown in scent and hard swallow.
this is how we see ourselves now.

as has been predicted on all fours,
understanding slightly more
of what that’s like. there were so many

who told us it would come to this
and now we semi-get it but we still think
we will rise up in a bit and things

will return to normal. we only semi-get it
as was predicted. this is normal now.
we will have to be down a long time,

longer than this, if we are ever to rise.
those who’ve lived here on all fours longer
stretch and prepare. as was predicted.

as their time down is done. if there will be
a rising at all they are ready. we remain
on all fours though they will lift us.

if we let them.
if we can vomit that poison.
if we take note of what has been predicted.

did or did not,
died or was killed,
suicide or homicide,

choose your focus:
another long day of lies
in a string of long days
or
one short night
you think is a
occasion for a burst
of truth

in the daily news
that feels like
just a
mystery

if it matters to you
or not, if you are sure
or not, if you have proof
or believe proof or not:

what are you going to do
except laugh at it or cry out
against it or make it into 
some middling joke to share
with the like minded

and those who did it
or did not
do indeed do
right out in the open
things you ought to
stop laughing at

and though mockery is all you have
or think you have 
or bother to use 

maybe

stop laughing 
pick a target
and do?

Enter, stage right, the muzzled
and the dumb. I am ready
to take them as they come.
I do not judge them for what they
seem unable to do;

we do such a good job of binding
and stupefying that it hardly seems fair
to stare down adversaries so stunted
they cannot see how tall
they could have been, or could still be.

It is not that I will stand for their aggression,
their threats, their torches and their guns:
no. If they come swinging 
I will swing; if shooting,
I will shoot. I have no good reason

to save these already destroyed,
though I pity them. I do in fact mourn
the need to do what I must to save myself
and those I loved. But I must
look beyond them to see 

the true enemy who made them
and use them and suck them dry
of cash and logic and compassion.
If I am made to hate anyone, I will reserve
that capacity for them. 

That hairline crack in my favorite bowl
is going to split open one day, either from
an accidental contact in the sink
or the excitation of the microwave.

This is all I am thinking about
right now: a mess yet to come;
the shards in the soapy water
or the oatmeal splattered on the steel walls.

This is all I am thinking about 
right now: dread for the clean up;
the blood in the water when I seize
an edge or a point without seeing it.

This is the only thing I am thinking about:
how much I’ll miss that bowl even though its end
is obviously near; how much nourishment
it has held for me; how short is its remaining time.

I make a late night call
to one of the last self-confessed
Americans and ask them
if we can talk about
what that identity means when
we are being asphyxiated
with increasingly little regard
for what anyone thinks about it.

“Who is this?” they ask me.
I cannot speak.
They wait for a beat, maybe two,
before hanging up.
I sit there for a long time
unable to answer, quaking
in the chair until I drift into horror sleep,
waking up hours after that
to the phone. It’s them.

What do I say to them? After
they are done speaking,
do I dare ask, as they did, 
“Who is this?”
What do I do if they also
cannot answer?

Simple stoneware cup.
Forty-five degree angle shadow.
Cats dreaming of the outdoors.

In a city south of here
they are telling tales of betrayal
and treason. Criminal stories

broadcast to the world.
Less than half
the listening world

believes the thieves
are thieves and nothing
in the story convinces them

so they will continue 
to burn the world into
white ash and bone.

In this house, cats still
fantasizing escape. The empty cup
casts a longer shadow; reminder

that whatever is out there, 
my loved ones, is still just
as unsafe as what’s in here.

You learn this early:
at night when you are
driving in a whiteout storm,
you keep your headlights 
low, focused on what’s
directly before you,
the next three yards of road.

If you turn them up,
put on the high beams,
the whiteness becomes
a blinding tunnel and 
whatever lurks ahead becomes
obscure and potentially
hazardous, if not Death itself.

You learn early that
staying safe in the whiteness
is best served by finding
a solid warm home where
you can sleep safely, have as many
or as few lights on as you want:
all you desire or need in full view.

When you wake and have to leave the house
(you will have to wake and leave the house)
you do it in full daylight. Do it
when you can see all the whiteness
for what it is. Everywhere,
the shroud and cold smother.
Hazards clear. Death, obviously there

but in plain view,
easier to fend off
and avoid for now,
if not forever; as time passes,
a promise rising in the air
that somehow,
all of this will be temporary.

Where will we find
the playing field
where we can triumph?

Where is there
any scoreboard
that shows us ahead?

Where is any pen in hand
scratching a “W”
next to our name?

We are exhausted
and every piece of equipment
we have is secondhand or broken.

We are injured
and our bandages are laden
with toxins and old blood.

We are demoralized
and disorganized, sundowning
and angry and embarrassed.

But I am tired
and demoralized and injured
by refusing to speak in specifics.

I am sidelined
while watching people die
on our streets, in our cages.

I am wounded
and from the edge of the fire
I can feel the heat rising.

If I still had a memory
I might recall a time
when we were winning

but now I only have
the moment, and in the moment
a Hail Mary pass is sinking

from its apogee toward a spot
where no one is waiting
to catch it and run it in to score.

I hate sports metaphors,
to be honest, the two sides
they paint into our lives;

the night and day narrative
that refuses to see the reality of dawn 
and dusk, or the distant existence

of midnight sun in other places
not within their purview; yet I cannot help
but think of winning and losing today,

imagining someone on another team
jackal-grinning as they prepare
to declare the game over, to proclaim

their victory. And then what?
Do they turn from the field
and leave us here to die?

I cannot say what they are thinking
but what I think is this:
where is the playing field

they have long ignored?
Where is the old wisdom
of a game they cannot play?

Where are those
they have never dreamed
of confronting?

We are something else,
something they’ve forgotten,
people they do not know.

They do not know us, the people 
of the dusk, the dawn,
the littoral, the interstitial 

spaces, the neither,
the either, the holy
and resilient in-between;

and what
they cannot fully know,
they cannot ever utterly defeat.

they pulled the rug from under her feet
just as she stood triumphant preparing to knock on the door
that had always been slammed in her face before
she was certain as she could be that this time things would be different 
and it would be opened to her with a flourish and a fanfare
but instead the rug was yanked and as she fell backward
someone was clearly laughing somewhere behind her 
someone she couldn’t see who might have been
the one who placed the rug before the door in the first place
in just the right spot to facilitate the jerk
and it might have been the same laugh she had heard before
from the other side of the door that nearly crushed her hand
every time it was slammed on her before she could even speak
and as she lay there on the hardwood staring up 
as a ceiling made improbably of opaque glass
(or one-way mirror and who knew who was watching and laughing up there as well)
it hit her at last in a different and better way that after all
whoever was behind all these obvious injuries and cliche assaults
built this place in the first place
built it full of booby traps
built it without her
built it to keep her out
and whoever was behind the door
or above the ceiling
whoever it was
who pulled that rug out from under her
was no one without this structure to protect them
and it was only natural
and long past time
for her to build something else