Protasis
Forensic ruin seeped into my life
Through the doorway to my future
No one was on guard
At the arrival of the dangerous ones
Some were close at hand
Others I never knew would come
Wedging the gate
Tragedy requires back story
A lifetime of striving
By sixteen I was
Working eighty hour weeks
Food service pays in varicose veins
And suicidal ideation
Even in the young
By eighteen I was broken
Poverty lay culpable
Years of struggle and abandonment
That words merely cheapen
Sisyphus my companion
Days blurred by petty change
Nights running down concrete corridors
Out the backdoor of the American mall
Into empty parking lots
Trying to see in the dark
Epitasis
Two years of saving
Promotions, evaluations, and initiations
Got me to the promise
Of higher education
A private school
Where students really mattered
My professors were my peers
The precious, spoiled kids
Their well pressed lives
Well, I didn’t fit in
My senior thesis in college
Liquid nitrogen flash freezing green buds
The mortal and pestle grinding
Separating into its elemental parts
Strands of Deoxyribonucleic Acid
Sent through gel electrophoresis to find
Random Amplified Polymorphic DNA Markers
Refining, comparing, determining genetic relatedness
A taste of things to come
It was a year of upheaval
A year of final tests
Joy ambushed me with an engagement
To the man across the hall
He created space,
Showed up with love
Grateful, besotted, and delirious
I allowed myself to imagine
White dress, black gown
Two rites of passage united
Emanating hope
Our congregation of families darkened
By dysfunction, divorce and illness
Friends devoured themselves
And one another
A poisonous spider struck leaving
Necrotic spots
These were our wedding gifts
We planned to graduate,
Get married, launch careers
Create a home from scraps
Broken but our own
A garden growing out of burnt earth
All these naïve shoots
Were overshadowed
By the advent of murder
Weeks of accusations,
Of horrors and of blood
Stained brown in time
A young woman’s life
Obliterated by greed
Her destiny slaughtered
For only nine hundred dollars
Her legacy so shattered
I can’t even remember her name
We were awfully estranged
No one could be together amidst
Celebration, mourning, and fighting
While the killer fled the nation
Bullet pierced her brow
Eradicating her last thought
Justice demanded a trial
Prejudice tore at the jury
Three days we deliberated, hung,
Through the apathy of one,
In the end the juror
Didn’t want to choose
She caved to watch her soaps
Judgment rendered a life sentence
Catastrophe
Juxtapositions that made no sense
Death/new life; union/dissolution
All chaos conspired
A close range shot
Titrating stress hormones
Each moment hard won
The surreal landscape expanded
Our honeymoon a gift
Spent on a hurricane ravaged
Caribbean island all the time
Knowing we were ruined
Never wanting to leave the
Destroyed place
We felt at home, the aftershock
A breath away from homelessness
With the monsters closing in
We fought each other
Vitriolic words
Directed at the sky
These things I never thought I’d learn
Exposed in graphic detail
The intensity of familial
And societal agony
Writ large
Shrapnel blown into me
The entrance wound looked clean
There was so little blood
It was the exit wound, the obscured one,
That proved the true disaster
Forensic ruin seeped into my life
Through that tiny hole, a portal to my future
Chromapoetica 