The courthouse “guest list” tallies poverty crimes from the revolving door of
welfare and jail. The reference weight cannot register the atomic pain of acrater-faced parent—black moon eyes—rolling their infant through metaldetector gates past the sheriff and into the waiting room of finger-smearedbrochures in “plain English” but really in legalese curling over the plexiglassstands among all the spoils of purgatory on paper—lifetimes in court docketsand the walls whispering decades of transcripts and on the table a newspaperspins obituaries for NIMBYs, erasing those who failed to live. Evidence ofnecropolitics as the true scale of life written in sponsored ink. Admission to heaven’s gate rigged for kings and sycophants. No Judge can weigh a heart pulled from the deepest pit of the living. When my heart is weighed of what it witnesses, it will be feather light. Squeezed of its muscle, like a fist of air from where I will blow a kiss for all those squeezed out of existence.
Originally published in Fire from the Heart 2024: Winners of the Muriel’s Journey Poetry Prize