How We Mourn Them

By Leana McClellan

We sorrow for them on the street, in the wind chill, because that is where their hearts were frozen. Our sorrow spreads like their warm, unapologetic blood which frames the margins of their ending.

Staring at our screens, we sorrow for them, we cover our open mouths with childlike hands as though this might muzzle our collective gasp. We are witness to their most intimate, sacred moments which we see over and over, as the news repeatedly pummels our brains and bodies. We urgently search for a place to stow this furious heartbreak.

Sorrow creates its own playbook from which we concoct schemes to go forward, ploys that become background static for sipping our coffee, walking the dog, sitting at desks, dreaming dreams. Even so, the leaden sadness of wilting flowers and stuffed animals left on the sidewalk fail to ease our free-falling despair.

Rene and Alex are not expendable nor are they bearable damage! Neither their ordinary goodness nor their resistance was enough to spare them. They were there, electric, pulsing with muscle and purpose one moment, then they weren’t.

So, we weep. And continue to defy.

Soothing Donald

By Leana McClellan

I dreamed that I was lying next to Donald Trump on poolside lounge chairs. Advisors were on either side on lounge chairs, all of us fully dressed, the men in suits, with red neck ties down to their knees. Donald looked fifty years younger, slimmer, with normal color skin and hair. But as usual he was yelling and complaining like a spoiled four-year-old because his advisors had told him he absolutely could not do something he really, really wanted to do.

In a swell of sisterly sympathy, I leaned over and hoovered my hand over his heart, lightly patting him, while softly telling him that everything was fine and it would be alright. I could feel his heart moving in his chest with my hand. Like a trembling, abandoned dog that just wants to not be afraid anymore, he began to calm.

The dream ended there and I was awake thinking, no! I don’t want to see him as a terrified human. He is a monster with the empathy of a virus. He has oceans of blood on his hands.

Why is my sub-conscious betraying me?
Maybe my psyche can no longer handle the prolonged loathing, the day in day out fury, the exhausting anticipation of the next cruelty and exploitation.

I will not surrender my outrage, but the borders of my self-righteousness seem very slightly more permeable. Maybe.

Note: for further exploration into Leana’s poetry, please visit her page in the SICA Artists’ Gallery under Writers/Poets