a poem in memory of George Floyd

Untitled by Kanchan Naik, News Team Contributor

and only the dead can make promises
with these streets; mouths parted
from their final breaths cannot lie
like the living.
the brown body is a broken secret
its reality exhaled into autopsies and caskets,
a gasping america can breathe again.

justice dances with the night, serenaded
by the whizz of rubber bullets; revenge,
the interlude.
a milken face screams into naked country
and the air is clothed in tear gas to protect
its dignity.

the brown body is a broken secret
whispered into the mouth of a shotgun
whose bullet binds the dead
in a vow of silence.