Today's poem is by Heather Lanier

"Bear Leads Police in Wild Chase
       

Through Streets of Anchorage,"
but yesterday a cop shot a man

who witnesses say was reading a book.
I only trust things that take a long time,

a friend said, like books and trees.
Two thousand five hundred feet

per second is how fast a bullet moves, a hundred
thousand times faster than a blink,

a decade faster than a book.
The cop believed the book was not

a book but a gun. In God's thesaurus,
a book is the opposite of a gun.

Last week another Black man had car trouble,
walked toward the siren with hands up.

Lives take nine months of nausea, I know,
each hour an eon as I stroke my belly,

try to keep food down. Lives take
years to be old enough to fear, although

less than eighteen, as many mothers know.
My babies come out slow and white.

A bullet is the opposite of a baby.
What book was he reading? The screen

doesnt say. Did our reader love chemistry?
The classics? His son? No word.

Instead, the website reports
that rioters in Charlotte smashed windows

and the bear jogged by a Pizza Hut
but no one was hurt, not even the bear.

Tweet

Copyright © 2023 Heather Lanier All rights reserved
from Psalms of Unknowing
Monkfish Book Publishing Company
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission