I know something you don’t.
How it feels to ease the rifles
from my father’s gun cabinet
into the camouflage duffel bag.
To sit at the table and ask
my sister about her shift, my heart
consumed with secret hammering.
I know what it is to be low,
the small one. To feel a vanishing
for those who say they love me
but do not imagine what I could do.
Schoolmates talk over me, my mother’s
eyes bore past my videogame’s
blood-drenched screen to her own
worries, but these are not reasons.
Reasons float beneath my deadpan
voice, speed my dream of bodies
shuddering before me as I cross
to a place where evil is both engine
and afterthought, where motives,
like victims, might as well not exist.
Photo by Mauro Monti
