Regarding Others’ Pain

1

She sat on the windowsill

one leg thrown over the green sash

like riding a horse.

The men in the room talked

quietly and she ignored them,

watching a car slow,

the driver leering at her bare leg

and bumping the curb.

He was a doctor or something,

doffing his hat to her neighbor in curlers

on the porch in her nightie.

Mornings the grackles were loud,

and the men grew loud as they spoke

of a burgeoning civil war

and what should be done.

They were all white, and argued

as if the force of their words

had a power they might activate,

2

driving a solution no one anywhere

imagined. They did not think

about how they sounded.

So full of, she thought, confidence—

definitely not her forte—

holding the belief

that words mattered was ir-

resistible when they got

going. She’d never before

not believed them. Now they

couldn’t agree. She’d seen

the pictures of those

thousands insistently refused

refuge, insisting; and observed

how in telling daily

moments the simple

small cruelties proved all

but imperceptibly tempting,

3

the gentle maneuver of with-

holding something, the

kindly (so it seemed)

delivery of no, the half

smile of regret, like a door

shown, after which,

the cutting the person

cold to shame, to

show them who had

the power, or that when one—

calling himself a leader—

yelled out out out

he meant business. Then

people hopped to expel

the outsider whose

mouth—as the crowd

pushed with its pincered

mind—was a perfect O.