2 Poems

by Keith Mark Gaboury

Italy

            Macguill, Dan. “Did Video Show Italian Army Trucks Transporting Coffins Amid  COVID-19 Pandemic?:                         A Stark Illustration of the Tragic Impact Coronavirus Had on Parts of Italy in 2020.” Snopes.com. 23                            March 2020.

Military trucks / transport 60 coffins / away from a crematorium / working flat out / can cremate 25 / the city intends to / return the ashes

June 30, 2020

Power Is Dissolving

from the hands of Rolex wearers
who chase their white bodies away
from the protests of black fists
clenched in downtown grids
burning like forest fires
smothering concrete bark
within urban ecology
stratified by skin
into the spine of a book
glorified on the splintered shelf of America
smiling only so long from a White
House window built by slaves
under an eighteenth-century sun
that still burns us
by the amendments
that need amending
in a 2020 choking
from the diseased soil of history.

August 30, 2020