A liberal is someone who thinks he knows more about your experience than you do. —James Baldwin
There is a wise white woman
in my life, counting dead black people.
They break her pulse, her heart.
That's real. She etches names
into a journal, copper markers
in her garden. She says, "Feel
like maybe it's someone else's
story, and I should stick to dandelions."
Blow ball fruits blown into air,
an untenable lawn. High flying
single seeds. Everything about this
poem tells me, Get out of the way.
Robert Carr is the author of Amaranth, a chapbook published in 2016 by Indolent Books. His poetry has appeared in the Bellevue Literary Review, Kettle Blue Review, TheNewVerse.News, Radius Literary Magazine, Pretty Owl Poetry, The Good Men Project and other publications. He lives with his husband Stephen in Malden, Massachusetts, and serves as an associate poetry editor for Indolent Books.