Summary

The poem begins by making a distinction between “poetry” and “rhetoric” (1). For the speaker, “poetry” is “being ready to kill / yourself” (2-3) while “rhetoric” refers to the readiness to kill “your children” (4).

Following these images of murder, the poem moves to the scene of a “desert of raw gunshot wounds” in which the speaker is “trapped” (5) and “lost” (16). In this landscape, there is a “dead” Black child who has been shot (6). The speaker notes the “blood from his punctured cheeks and shoulders” (8), which to her is “the only liquid for miles” (9) in this “desert” (5). The speaker feels sick and thirsty, as her “stomach / churns” (10-1) and her “mouth splits into dry lips” (12). At the end of the second stanza, this “dead child” (6) is revealed to be the speaker’s “dying son” (19). He has suffered “hatred and destruction” (18). She unsuccessfully tries to “heal” him “with...