I hear my city at war,
or maybe I’m hearing
my own heart like a war
with its million ammunitions,
million missing limbs, its slow
roaring movement through loss.
I was the barrel of a shotgun.
I was the wrong way out of town.
I was a lone moving animal,
trying to find the door to your house.
In times like this I try to ignore
the numbers, the body counts,
the orphaned young. But this war
makes me a listener so I understand
the crashing, my body moving:
a mistake. Let me warn you:
I bring the hurricanes, the forest
fires, the non-God fearing baptisms of the earth
and they take me in their arms like a familiar stranger.
As a moving funeral in this drunken city,
I leave bright trinkets in my wake.
As a moving funeral in all the other cities,
I leave the already worn land, the dry brush, the barely lit
match. I leave the ghost towns behind,
later drive past the washed out houses,
the burnt branches of that mountain.
I wish I could say those skeleton lands
have never moved me.
-marlo barrera
june-september 2010
