Sandra Bland, Texas

On the highway home last night
you reappeared to me opposite where I was headed,
so tell me, was it

a cigarette that bothered your jailer so?
(They let me go the one time I blew smoke
into a trooper’s face.) In the footage

your final revolt. I stood before you
more than once, more than sex
and color separated us, and why
should you call a doctor kin. Sandra Bland,

we broke you down,
I say your name, how broke. You died
on the day the Hollywood sign
was dedicated. For you I name
this town, and after every woman
the police killed, a town.

• •

Dear Sandra,
I just got done with hours
of Civil War documentaries. “Useless,
useless,” John Wilkes Booth said
of his hands as his final words. An echo
of Kurtz’s “horror.” The Civil War, it turns out,
set a standard for modern wars,
one century into another.

And as the Confederate commander
of Andersonville prison camp felt the noose
around his neck, he, too, said
he was merely obeying orders.

Armies said. The police said.
The doctor, triaging collaterals, said.
The historian, wanting us to be the greatest,
said. The Civil War is a pointer to
future liberation for all kinds of folk, a milestone
in which no clear victor emerges,
since time is the master to whom
even literature submits.

• •

We have schools,
counties, forts, clinics,
and at one point a hospital
named after Jefferson
Davis in Texas.
We have nothing
named after you.
Will you excuse me,
Sandra, for naming a poem
an imaginary place that,
as with any home,
one doesn’t inhabit
all alone, even if
in a coffin one is
all that there is?
And one, not even,
and far more.

• •

Which “we” is it I speak of? Those of us
who didn’t play a part in your disintegration know
that we play a part. Not all players even
the field. We’re a catalog that goes on like hypha.

If it is resuscitation I seek
through your citation

it isn’t resuscitation I seek. Your mother called you
Sandy and with countless others loved your smile
beyond my arithmetic of commemoration.
Sioux City, Tucson, Tuskegee, Seattle.

• •

To persuade me that war is retribution
for unspeakable sins, a comeuppance, a bit
theological for me all this. But to think
of war as entropy’s work, order
and disorder in a waltz that sees
not the identities we historicize into chains
of absolute ghosts? How is it that
women (to mention one example) have always
suffered greater injustice, endured
more pain than men have,
what entropy is this
that singles out?

• •

History has rendered this kind of math incalculable.
History manufactured out of and against our biology,
seduced as a dog is lured with a treat.
Between nuance and essentialization, I sing myself.
Between cost-benefit ratio and the unattainable
I see freedom in amendments I further amend.
Between my trauma and another’s passage,
speaking and the spoken for.

• •

It’s clear you’re my pretext, Sandra, you were
an Aquarius (my dad’s as well). But do zodiacs exist

for birth into the underworld? If so, then on the date
your breath no longer tethered your body, you became
a Cancer, proliferative, this nation’s sign.

• •

Under that sign, ten years before your murder,
I asked myself in Darfur, What is the threshold
for suffering to create us equal? It’s low

enough for anyone to dance the limbo
and stay on their feet the whole
song through, if we choose. I fear our twin
consciousness cannot hold. Our voodoo

and epigenetics, our quantum and wizards,
snakes and ladders. Yet my weakest faith
(when I remember it) is that I don’t visit
my grief upon those whose pain is more acute

than mine, or is chronic with more frequent flares.
Is there an equation to help me exempt
others from my loyalty oath to taxonomy,
a step in my deliverance from woe?

• •

Nuance, too, competes with generality
for erasure, a visibility each mode can perform

well: where is that threshold?
So that prudent justice isn’t laundered

against the baler angels of our nature, Sandra,
I rise up from my apoptosis under

a cherry tree into an olive. What crimes
won’t I pardon or dissipate into energy

if suffering is folded in spacetime?
Is our empathy’s nebula pacifist

or a ruse of the tongue sat in dentition?
I reckon the ten words in which Honest Abe

counted “the people” a trinity at Gettysburg
are what the Black Panthers heard.

• •

Ms. Bland,
I also learned
that singularity
is achieved only
when one is torn
to irreconcilable
pieces, decomposed
unrecoverable
six fathoms up,
down, indivisible,
unflagged
undertow for all.

Ms. Bland,
how much
of me is you
and you is we?