I Had Me A Wife, I Had Me Some Daughters

Massive heat dome come
Down on me — I’ve run myself
Ragged — nobody knows
What I’ve done to my family.

As the Fata Morganas shimmered away — 
I dug a hole as big as could be
Dropped them in, one by one,
In the dark maw of atavistic iniquity.

Released to the night crawlers — 
Oh, Lord, please, let them take root
By the leprous shagbark hickory —
I did unto them as they unto me.

In the dead of the morning
When the tree towers above me
I’m gonna hang myself on that gnarled branch
Of the family tree.

“…this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.”

— Adrienne Rich / “What Kind of Times Are These”