REQUIEM FOR USED IGNITION CAP
Give God no dead
with their brains
busted out, no black
shotguns beside them
empty—not the boy’s suicide
explained as accident
—not his grief manifold
in his family’s tongues
taken out of their mouths
by the power of it:
all that pain unloading.
The body quits.
The spirit does. Beyond
Sorry, sorry, no one knows
what to say. Let what joins us
be more than our lamentation.
Every tether we tie to that
shotgun blast renders us
split open, too. Seeing
the evidence of it
we cannot be blameless:
casing intricate, green
on the boy’s bedroom floor
& as singular now
as the souvenir kept
from some scenic island:
smooth shell thick with buck-
shot meant to enter
the flesh of a dangerous man
or an animal. Please, we say,
prophesying, take no children from us.
Give us no miracle today—
no rain to fill our emptiness
except him, Lord—
that shattered boy back
in our fold still praying
earnestly for pain to cleanse him
with his head buried deep
in his hands, or else raised
to the sky when rain pellets
strike him: slick mouth open, drinking.
