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The Casual Slurs Early in an evening of remembering death, I tell my friend that after the Kent State shooting, After students like me went home and waited out Our anger, the police came armed to Jackson State Like a recreation of the Ohio Guard. They herded those students, I tell him. They backed them Against the front wall of a dorm and suffered stones And bricks until they opened fire as if they’d loved The headlines from the week before, emulating The Midwest’s faux-army, sustaining their gunfire Thirty seconds with an armory of weapons. Almost five hundred times, I say, they hit that dorm. Two dead, twelve wounded, all of them “nigger students” According to the cop who called in the shooting. That speaker’s nickname was “Goon,” something history Can’t make up, his casual slurs, on tape, leaching Into the voiceless future to poison language, The violent separations that mark our speech Though we’ve forgotten their indecipherable Beginnings, ones like birth and the early years, what We hear about from the mouths of those who love us. 87 P 1FINCKE_pages.qxd 5/21/08 9:31 AM Page 87 ...

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