Portside

My friend says she wants to shoot

the mockingbirds who infest the big tree

outside her window and sing all night.

The violence of their squawks is not the same

as the violence of our thoughts

about them at 2 a.m. or the gunshots

and illegal fireworks punctuating this warm evening

as we sit in front of our television watching two old men,

one blustering, one faltering

at the lip of the abyss, and an invisible pool

of despair spreads like blood out from the screens

and into our living rooms and pools around our feet

and we lift our feet up but go on watching

as it engulfs us on our sofas, forks poised

halfway to our mouths, frozen there, watching.

And just as the violence of the what the actual fuck

we’ve had some of the smartest women on the planet

in contention for this job, but no, it’s gotta be

two men who cannot seem to form

one coherent sentence between them

spraying from my mouth like machine gun fire

is not the same as the killer in the supermarket

spewing actual bullets that ricochet off carts,

or the maniac at the music festival with his bump stock,

or the white supremacist at the Black church,

or the anti-Semite at the synagogue, still, I confess,

there is murder in my heart, there is so much rage

boiling inside my own body, inside the body

of everyone I know—we are all simmering this summer

with a thin metallic taste in our mouths

as if we’d been given old-fashioned shock treatments

which we have, and are now sitting inside

the absolute blankness of the questions

who the hell are we and how did we get here,

and what happens now?

Alison Luterman is the author of four collections of poetry: The Largest Possible Life, See How We Almost Fly, Desire Zoo, and In the Time of Great Fires. She also writes personal essays, plays, and song lyrics. www.alisonluterman.net