Eulogy for America

May 25, 2022

I awake in tangled sheets and look for it on the news, behind sorrowful faces, in bursts of crossfire rage on Facebook, infantile Twitter rants. Then I leave the house, search for it in the park, the bagel shop, behind friendly nods in the aisle at Publix, folks waving as I pedal past on the trail, flickers of sunlight passing under live oaks, Spanish moss swaying in the mournful breeze, but I see no sign of it anywhere, just another day in the land of the free because, well, we’re old hands at this, because we’ve been

through it before, because our children know all about it under their soft unbroken skin, because nothing has changed from last week’s massacre, last month’s bloodbath, all the dreadful years before when horror lived among us—

not moronic zombie horror, not little boy paintball horror— but horror down in the marrow, terrifying horror that arrives when we must muster the courage to see the long history of our inhumanity, when we remember what it looks like, how it smells when it sears the soul, how it forces the moral moment, makes us worthy again and again of life on this divine earth, only to find that it has dissappeared right in front of our baleful eyes May 25, 2022 the day horror is declared dead on arrival in America. —SL, Port Royal, SC, May 2022