David P. Miller
Angelic Ghazal
Brethren, shrug your shoulders, yawn. The killed were “no angels.”
Who’ll hose the blood away? Our high-fivin’ bro angels.
Prez gotta have a pic clutching Prez Bible upside down.
Prepare ye the tear-gas way, arch-roboangels.
One body, brown, four hours sheeted silent in the street.
Flatlined on the double yellow, feed for crow angels.
Very unfair, sez Prez, people to genius me are so unfair!
So bless their souls with rubber bullets, status quo angels.
Turn in your hymnals to Lord, we fear for our pale lives.
Now sing sound cannons, let them blow, angels!
Bullets no-knock through bedclothes. Justice pinkslipped at the curb.
I’m sick of your golf junkets, God. And your damned slow angels.
—Submitted on 09/27/2020
David P. Miller is the author of Sprawled Asleep (Nixes Mate Books, 2019) and The Afterimages (Červená Barva Press, 2014). His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Hawaii Pacific Review, Turtle Island Quarterly, poems2go, riverbabble, and other journals. He is retired from a career in library services, and lives in Boston.
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