Melissa Crowe

America you’re breaking

my heart     breaking even my
heartbreak     your stupid
gleaming bulk calving into darkness
at an ever increasing rate     My fists
clench of their own accord     the word
no always vibrating     my mouth
I’ve had a headache for one thousand
two hundred and four days     America, beloved
does every kid pretend to be dead
doing the dead man’s float?
Is everyone comforted knowing
there are creatures in the Marianas Trench
10,000 miles down     creatures nobody’s
ever seen     nobody ever will?
Does everyone think as much as
I do about whales giving birth
in the sea     those massive
babies borne from saline
into saline     Sweet abiding
underwater milk     America, I was
a stranger and you teargassed me?
I was your daughter and you grabbed
my ass    your son and you shot me
in the street     I was a baby and you
taught me to stand on the toilet
hiding my feet?     America,
darling     imagine the quiet
of the sunken city     no panic room no
closet lollies     no ricochet     just that dumb
undulation     that senseless sunlashed  glow

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Melissa Crowe is the author of Dear Terror, Dear Splendor (University of Wisconsin Press, 2019), and her work has appeared in Crab Orchard Review, POETRY, Seneca Review, Thrush and Tupelo Quarterly, among other journals. She’s coordinator of the MFA program in creative writing at UNCW, where she teaches poetry and publishing.