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Imagine the Angels of Bread
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- This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
- gazing like admirals from the rail
- of the roofdeck
- or levitating hands in praise
- of steam in the shower;
- this is the year
- that shawled refugees deport judges
- who stare at the floor
- and their swollen feet
- as files are stamped
- with their destination;
- this is the year that police revolvers,
- stove-hot, blister the fingers
- of raging cops,
- and nightsticks splinter
- in their palms;
- this is the year
- that darkskinned men
- lynched a century ago
- return to sip coffee quietly
- with the apologizing descendants
- of their executioners.
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- This is the year that those
- who swim the border's undertow
- and shiver in boxcars
- are greeted with trumpets and drums
- at the first railroad crossing
- on the other side;
- this is the year that the hands
- pulling tomatoes from the vine
- uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
- the hands canning tomatoes
- are named in the will
- that owns the bedlam of the cannery;
- this is the year that the eyes
- stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
- awaken at last to the sight
- of a rooster-loud hillside,
- pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
- this is the year that cockroaches
- become extinct, that no doctor
- finds a roach embedded
- in the ear of an infant;
- this is the year that the food stamps
- of adolescent mothers
- are auctioned like gold doubloons,
- and no coin is given to buy machetes
- for the next bouquet of severed heads
- in coffee plantation country.
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- If the abolition of slave-manacles
- began as a vision of hands without manacles,
- then this is the year;
- if the shutdown of extermination camps
- began as imagination of a land
- without barbed wire or the crematorium,
- then this is the year;
- if every rebellion begins with the idea
- that conquerors on horseback
- are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
- if plunged in the river,
- then this is the year.
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- So may every humiliated mouth,
- teeth like desecrated headstones,
- fill with the angels of bread.
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from
Imagine the Angels of Bread
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