Faraway
happy clouds,
a white glove party
which laughs and points fingers.
they float over
a cherry soda sun,
sugar in their bellies. safe.
just like that, they change:
behold a pale crowd,
pockets bulging with stones.
a swoop of nighthawk
and throats of nameless frogs
frame the stage
as the victim waits,
watching many a vee
of northbound geese.
always, she thinks,
that same letter--
V V V …
flying off,
swift and free,
to chase some faraway home.
====================
"Lynchings were part carnival, part torture chamber, and attracted thousands of onlookers who collectively became accomplices in public sadism. Photographers ... made postcards ... for people to send to their loved ones. People mailed postcards of the severed, half-burned head of Will James atop a pole in Cairo, Illinois, in 1907. They sent postcards of burned torsos that looked like the petrified victims of Vesuvius, only these horrors had come at the hands of human beings in modern times ... One spectator wwrote on the back of his postcard from Waco, Texas, in 1916: "This is the Barbecue we had last night my picture is to the left with the cross over it your son Joe." ... (Wilkerson, Caste, 2023)
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