Breadcrumb #515
NANCY HIGHTOWER
There’s a school with clocks
that tell yesterday's time,
traps girls with perfectly drawn
eyebrows in the dusk of their iPhones.
In a bank five women kneel as if
in prayer while a gunman counts
backwards to tomorrow’s news
when he’ll be seen as a prophet,
bold as Moses, who understood that forty years
is nothing when milking the desert for honey,
like the rock star who fucked
kids and called it love,
like the politician who painted
his china bone face black for a party,
argued that it’s zero sum game
once you’ve made it to the promised land
where every sunrise is a lie,
every sunset, a hemorrhaged memory
of caged children, their skin
stretched thin as soap.