The Jesse Owens Incident
A gun clips a hole in the night.
Then something worse.
A horrible,
twisted,
corroding
masterpiece of sight.
Everything happening
all at once—
and yet…
nothing.
Only the void left from cut
off dreams
of the casual vacancies.
Silence.
The sky shatters;
explosive to the eyes,
but the floating splinters
have no sound.
Then white,
of the deafening kind.
The leftover nothing is worse.
Yellow hair, the face of a mannequin.
Rudy?
Is that you?
Rudy?
Wake up!
Skin charcoaled;
a painful reminder
of a collapsed dream,
fallen
with the buildings
of Heaven Street.
In her mind
she is calling out one thing.
She is chanting
Rudy Steiner's name
—and his name
is Jesse Owens.
She gives him
what she can;
the kiss of life.
But he is already dead.
Dead.
She is frozen.
She is burning.
Her words are the ash,
of burnt books,
which a thief took
to darken his skin,
enact his dream.
Hitler did not shake his hand.
She rocks back and forth.
Something
caught
somewhere in her mouth until—
"Rudy."