ABC No Rio in Exile at Bullet

Jim Costanza and Mike Estabrook, part of theJudgement Day show at Bullet Space

The taste of rubble

(It's been ages since I wrote on this blog. But it's time to vent, and move some words around on a page. After the occasion of the Senate tax bill middle-of-the-night vote, December 2, bastard Republicans 51-49. And after Juan Felipe Herrera Enter the Void)

The smell of rubble. Not a smell, really, but a coating and a choking. The taste of rubble, the grit and crunch between teeth, the clouds of dust that rise as you move, as things fall, as things pale. Smoke of dust and bone. Wet things in the rubble, unidentified and terrifying. Accidents of birth and circumstance. I chose the rubble I stood in but there’s no promise my walls won’t come tumbling down. What lives felt normal, until they weren’t? I sat at my computer, calm and quiet, until the building started to shimmy and shake, and a crack opened by my bed. My nightmares rain rubble. Lina went home to Rome and one day, in her kitchen, the floor opened beneath her and left her, broken, in the new rubble of her life. How many children are spitting rubble, or split and broken from it, unexpectant and incomprehending. Tax plan. Military spending. Calls and emails and no avail. Military spending. Children broken into pits of brick and stone and bone and dust and horror and mothers wailing and brothers digging and the mess sending people fleeing their homes to – not help, not open arms, not shelter and safety, but to cold and fear and abuse. To be depicted in lies and fury. When I was six years old my father brought home a family he found on the side of the road, to live with us for months. Rubble rains down when you least expect it. You can dig, you can carry, you have to water down that dust. Spit it out.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58274/enter-the-void