Ryan McCarty

Because The News Was Already Saying No Foul Play Before Anybody Thought To Call Trey Reed’s Mom

I don’t usually like to talk to you,
but America, I can’t live with it. I’m sick
like the sweat of the trash
can left lidded up. I’m sick
of the rotten things under, making
the stench. I’m sick of knowing it
might be some bodies. But good
god, even worse, I can’t take the boldness –
the bravado it takes to hang folks out to die
then it’s all just a shrug and a nothing to see
here, when you know we can’t not look
because the bloated eyes
are staring at us. The lids are half
dropped like the flags after one
fascist fetches what he’s been selling
but nothing comes down for us
except some bad news knocking at the door.
Dozens and hundreds and thousands of us
tap out and say no more
and the knee stays right there. And we say it wasn’t me
who took the hostages, and the soldier
and the senator and the donor say but you keep taking
more and more breaths so here come more bombs.
And my neighbor is crying
because she doesn’t know
where her son’s been taken or if the faces
under the masks were smiling, but she suspects
she knows. And another neighbor can’t figure out
how to carry enough in her two small arms
while the landlord’s dragging her niece’s bed
down the driveway and there are books
with butterflies on them flying down the block
and the sanitation department’s asking
for a forwarding address
to send her a fine for all this litter along the curb.
And my daughter is watching.
She keeps getting pamphlets to submit her work
for the Celebrating Our Differences youth art show
but she can’t figure out how to draw
the empty sound of the classroom
every time a friend see their father’s ghost
waiting at the door next to me at parent pick up.
And that’s the difference
I can’t take anymore, America, you just gotta be fair.
You gotta kill everyone and be done – me, the other
teachers, the veterans waiting for mercy
on the offramp, the customers with stuffed bags
who round up for kids healthcare, the old men
ringing bells for change, school kids waving
off the flies from a grandmother looking
for a home that’s long gone, construction workers
staring down mandatory hour reduction still
filling in the ground with steaming tar that they know
will never stay in place, the EMT who still considers
giving mouth to mouth if there’s any hope
it will bring just one of us gasping
back to our bodies and a chance to live
the good life, anyone who’s trying to live
the good life, just smoke us all – every last singer
and sharer and gardener and seat giver upper
on the bus – every last breathing one of us.
Burn us up and seed the hole opening in the sky overhead.
Find out how you like living with yourself,
while we take a break, waiting as the clouds
go dark over our memory, getting ready to rain
down on you, then grow up like a billion weeds
going to seed and you’ll never clear us away.

Ryan McCarty is a writer, teacher, and community do-what-he-can. His writing has been published recently in The Ann Arbor Observer, Coal City Review, Collateral, Dunes Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Left Voice, MQR Online, One Art, and Writers Resist, but it almost always appears first on the bus between home and work.