She knew how to be poor.
She knew how to miss the one element she needed
more than any other.
When it was hard to get air, she could see it in the eyes.
She was a test.

What did she do? Any leadership qualities?

She would surround the results with her arms
but she was not magic; block it with her body
but she was not medicine.
She had hoped for long years that she was
but there was the truth in spikes and curves.

She’d find truth marching
across endless metal trays in slaughterhouses,
clinging to the instruments that would cut throats,
dismember, discard the invisible.

She would find truth in her voice
but she was no commander.

That she knew how to be poor did not get anyone
the air they needed.
Men lay underneath blue armies of thugs, gasping for it.
Women ascended, lit up as threatened
with fireballs consuming their elements.

She wondered about that gift she’d developed for so many years,
one it seemed no one could take away,
knowing how to be poor. Knowing how
not to have enough air.

That gift seemed not to do a damned thing, really,
as a country devoured its nurses, its doctors, its orderlies, its cooks, its cashiers.
Its drivers. Its elders. Its harvesters. Its children.
Its messengers slicing through the air of empty streets with food, with medicine.
What else could she do?

She knew how to fly, though. She knew how to fly through the empty diamonds
of the clanging of cages, above a silver sea of weeping and fevers.
She could not lift the children out, though.
Useless woman.

She knew how to move into water and not rise,
lodge herself in the stickiness of river bank
while the whole howl of grief that flowed like river
was helpless
and could not free a child and her father,
nor even turn them over to reach the air, the sun.
Her voice came forward, but the embrace was already death.

She’d known how to march down a road
washed by the tips of the palms
and arrive too late, just after
the fragments of the village
flung themselves like miserable fireworks.

She’d known
how to arrive and she learned
how to leave.

The foul microbes of the past kept circulating
and all about her was the spread of the old hells
clearing their throats, practicing their speeches,
spewing danger and manifestos.

She knew how to grieve but it was useless.
She knew how to fear but it was masked
so that no one saw full on the terror
that had born her into this world.

These were her skills. But she will not be she.

She will be the one who finally gets there on time
the one who with her whole being will pull one tiny moon
of a child’s nail out of the river
to hang over us like the tap of a song.

She would hold the one who will lose her skin
as she runs down that road like a story
screaming for its echo to be drowned
in no sad bloody river but in the eyes of the mirror
that has finally been looked into, under the tap of song
and the blazing child, the mirror that will hurl lightning
at even the thought of repeating
what should never have once made nightmare from life.

Near the golden pier at the windy bay
where the people line up to fling themselves into the chill blue

She remembers having done something that made light.
She remembers having even made song.
She remembers having opened a door.
She remembers that she is as good as the world let her be.
She remembers that she is better,
better than permission.
She remembers she is yet to die.
She remembers that she is blazing howling brilliant gift
who wants others to cherish their own.
She remembers she is note in chorus, green plant, blood root.
She is ginger walking. She is gold of spice. She is voice that cries out. She is dance.

No longer seeking employment.
She is not death until she dies and then after a moment she is something else.