On 9/11/2001 guns were turned
on us as aeroplanes Noam Chomsky
explained before a crowd
at the University of Madras.
Now, twenty-four years later
guns are again pointing at us,
dropping down from
the Blackhawk hanging in the sky
over a building full of citizens
and migrants, brown-skinned,
shivering in the night air, ziptied,
naked, in bedclothes, stolen from
sleep and asked to produce birth
certificates, passports, doors
to their apartments bashed in
by three hundred masked
and camouflaged men showing
no search warrant, wearing
Infrared shades, an operation
to neutralize a migrant, deliverer
of food, driver, store clerk,
runner for the exchange of milk
and eggs, not the gang member
the Department of War Propaganda
deems reasonable cause for
the night raid on the South Side
against bona fide Americans
in these United States.
Indran Amirthanayagam writes a Substack. His publications include El bosque de deleites fratricidas ( RIL Editores), Seer (Hanging Loose Press),The Runner's Almanac (Spuyten Duyvil), Powèt Nan Pò A: Poet of the Port (Mad Hat), and Ten Thousand Steps Against the Tyrant (Broadstone Books). He is the translator of Kenia Cano’s Animal For The Eyes (Dialogos Books) and Origami: Selected Poems of Manuel Ulacia (Dialogos Books). He edits The Beltway Poetry Quarterly, hosts the Poetry Channel on YouTube, and publishes poetry books with Sara Cahill Marron at Beltway Editions.
