How do you save a house on flames and everyone in it?
What I mean is
I’m throwing the tennis ball to my 4-year old dog
as evening sun presses itself into the horizon,
And a little boy is shot once and then again,
Right in the center of his Marvel superhero shirt,
hand-me down and stained with ketchup,
where he bleeds out his small body
onto a cobbled street,
All rocky like even the road doesn’t know where to go,
what I mean is I’m ordering a BLT sandwich
with a side of fries
in the crimson Silver Diner booth
and another baby is stillborn
and the mother is grieving her empty body
in the hospital bed under sterile
Yellow lights and sheets that smell like Purell sanitizer,
and thousands of miles away,
a girl and her brother fish through a garbage
With dirt caked fingers, searching
For something still left in a wrapper,
No, just for something,
And I’m stretched under the covers
at night, pulled into sleep,
and someone does not wake up
and someone does not wake up
and someone does not wake up,
and in the morning I wake up
and the day is mine, curled up
At the foot of my bed,
and a dog lies at a concrete curb burned
With cigarette butts, watching a man shake a tin
Can and wag a sign scrawled in Magic Marker,
And it’s like he’s talking to a wall, the way no one
looks his way as they pass, or like he’s the wall,
A pile of rusting bricks, maroon and crimson
Like a scab, nothing more than something wounded
Trying to protect itself further.
And this is the moment he loses
His happiness and the high-pitched laughter that comes with it,
The contagious kind that won’t return
for some time.
What I mean is I can’t save something burning
From the inside out. The heat is getting to me.
I breathe in curled gray smoke
And belly sobs and grief, and each day,
it becomes harder to find air.
There is only so much sadness a body can hold.
What I mean is I love my ancestors, the dark-haired,
Dark-eyed people clothed in saris and kurtas who held me as a bundle,
something pink with a shock of black hair and big, dark eyes,
Fresh to this place and clear lung-ed,
but they left me a world in flames.
I forget what other colors look like. This place is red, so red,
the red a sun bleeds into each night, and morning
Cracks itself into birth, like how a wildfire
Pushes new fireweed out the ash ground
into the smoky air.
Maybe this world is like that too, like if we set
we can rise. Grandmother, I
Don’t know where you are, but I’m looking
up when I say this. Remember
When we sprawled out on the cool sand,
bare feet and thin cover ups, the sky all blue,
Baby blue and royal blue and electric blue, breaking
into day? In that moment,
It felt like everything could be saved.
I fall into sleep, dreaming
Of those blues, like hose water, like rainfall,
like we can find something to douse
This, to rescue the burning house
and the things inside of it.