Red State

Sheila Black is the author of House of Bone, Love/Iraq, and Wen Kroy. She is also the author of three chapbooks, most recently, All the Sleep in the World (Alabrava Press, 2021). Her poems and essays have appeared in such places as Poetry, Kenyon Review Online, and The New York Times.

Red State

What we hunger is the repetition of what we know,

he tells me as explanation for

the misery, the figure of a policeman battering the head

of a protestor, who is a mere girl,

her hair a cloud across her blurring face. Aches for more.

he says this, and I flinch. How long

has he been speaking this way? How long have we been

spoken to this way—as though we did not know

anymore how to lift our heads or apprehend even the mythic

girl, who keeps describing what she sees,

and being disbelieved, even as the cities fall, even as Hector

is dragged by his hair around the outside wall

until he is nothing. The Senator from Indiana says “women

will resent this at first, but then they will be grateful,”

and I look down at my hands, my empty, empty hands

I listen to the friend who tells me

outrage is painful, but at least it spurs you to action;

anxiety can be a kind of comfort, but it only keeps you frozen.

Sun is rising—that most perfect repetition; the repetition

of light, and the leaves opening, the leaves on whom everything

depends, though we rarely think of them, only sometimes stopping

to examine their river-veins, consider where they get their green.