No Earth Survives a Country
after Samiya Bashir
Long: a measurement; the distance it takes to remember.
Remember: everything that had to fall.
Fall: the end of summer’s tyranny.
Tyranny: some part of us we could not love.
Love: absent from a bruise; a god who makes promises and threats with rain.
Rain: it easily insists; a way through a crack.
Crack: there had been warnings; a sound heard when the truth arrived.
Arrived: at the foot of history with smirks on our faces.
Faces: vaguely appearing in clouds; their knowing mercy.
Mercy: this new world.
World: oh, how it gives; a bed …
