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.

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