White Stucco Black Wing

Another Brilliant Day

45 Another Brilliant Day The point was it wasn’t like being anywhere. And after the salty chips and a green sauced enchilada and one or two bottles of dark Mexican beer it was back into the car to drive out into the teasingly warm night. On the radio whatever it was singing so that the dark itself was no longer compromised. My mind stays nowhere for more than a second. It’s always been like that but now its resting time seems nonexistent. All the time I feel sad. As in the aftermath of death. This I mask. 46 By six the sun is bright. In fact at five forty seven the sky all easter egg blue and pink. Light clutches the rims of each of this window’s four panes of glass Electronic sensate I’ve become. trees exploding white flowers. Pear trees someone said. The light that all winter blued through the window shows green. Not just any blue, any green. 47 Let yourself go down into like a cave where men wait heads in hands for shelling to stop. Darker at the end, at the mouth, the brightness, fire go down into let yourself down into the slosh so like the death of any body of water brine shrimp exoskeletons bunching at the shore Civilian body count 227 minimum 307 maximum only the first week. Another brilliant cold day. Someone cutting grass. The grass so long that bunches of the long blades lie all the same way like shocks of hair. That watermelon smell razor sharp and green. 48 Children who look like they are sleeping when loaded into the back of a truck, sun slashing its walls gentle fly buzz, fingers of their small hands folded inward on their palms, as though some secret still tightly held, something they will now never let go of What gives you the right Where are you from In the street now cars slowing horns angrily 49 It was just a place, that café, somewhere to be, here in the Land of White Noise. Everywhere a lawn being mowed. Women wearing tiny American flags of cubic zirconia. Where in spring flowered trees lean this way then another Warm March wind shakes the glass of this room. Not harshly. One crow calls. Black thin limbs of small trees elliptically red budded. Taller trees showing spring’s small green fists. Does the body move differently when you walk to the curb in the morning bend down? And inside the new house how you spread the pages the faint crinkle familiar to your smoothing palm. How you lift the cup of dark coffee. The tone in which you speak to the cat. No. No. 50 Spread the pages. Who is crying today? Mother lost a son. Father lost three daughters. Child lost both arms. City lost fifty from the poorest part, the market. These scenes are graphic and may contain content offensive to some. The bodies drawn from their trays in the cabinets. A child who seems to be dressed in red. Helplessly weeping, a big-nosed man covers his eyes with one hand. A voice says quietly Mohammed, Mohammed. Then the hospital where from a boy’s body wrapped in white gauze a plastic tube trails. You see it all. The man raising the boy’s shirt to show us. The boy’s hands as he pushes it down. ...