Rue

One would ask
of the lurking white world
if it would end
in luminous water
or nearby on the wheel
a cudgel and a rock outcropping
in hand and a popcorn
ceiling phone skittering on
a dead connection.

It’s three hours since we buried our goats
in gothic rue
and there’s someone muttering
in ether and yellow cavils
in orange overalls.

I can’t decipher it
and a woman hovers about
beyond my line of sight
eyeless in the gloaming
and incontrovertible.

“The most threatening racist movement is not the alt-right’s unlikely drive for a White ethnostate but the regular American’s drive for a ‘race neutral’ one. The construct of race neutrality actually feeds White nationalist victimhood by positing the notion that any policy advancing non-White Americans toward equity is ‘reverse discrimination.’”

— Ibram X. Kendi / How To Be An Anti-Racist