And Should We Thank God

We sit slightly stupefied—

paper plates damp with brisket fat

flowering in the trash. The baby

bouncing on her father’s knee

while he tells us. His wife tells us.

Their baby sleeping while police took aim

at her father. Not at the white man

he finally had pinned to the ground,

that man who had finally materialized solid

after haunting them for weeks,

who shattered their windows,

who made their chests draw tight,

who scrawled the slur first

sometime past midnight—

His wife found it, the slump of “n,”

on the driver’s door,

ending like a wave cresting

on the passenger side. The damp of morning

on black paint. The sun bleeding

into the sky, a crushed marigold,

our table’s burning centerpiece.