DEATH COMES FOR MINNEAPOLIS
On the numbing effects of state violence...
“Violence is not completely fatal until it ceases to disturb us.”
― Thomas Merton, Thoughts in Solitude
DEATH COMES FOR MINNEAPOLIS
Touch a hot pot and the first time you wince.
Touch it again and your nerves go numb.
Spend your life in a kitchen and pretty soon
your hands are calloused and nerves burnt dead.
I watched a man gun down a woman in her car.
The bullet hole as wide as a nickel, cracks
crisscrossing her windshield, her neighbors
calling for help, while masked men
corralled them like cattle and onlookers
watching, couldn't look away.
I don't even think I blinked. Just put my phone
down and kept walking. Too numb
to process her death. The barrel of his gun
one of many. Her body one of many,
like an assortment of limbs tangled and limp,
faces obscured by the verdict of motion,
and all of us watching, playing witness,
too scared to speak. Too numb to move.
I long for the days you'd touch a stove and wince in pain.
At least then, we could still feel the flame—
I wish all these deaths didn't feel the same.