Certainly flashlights were burning
into the darkness.
There were whispers,
rumors and lies told—worse, believed!
And the sound of doors
cracking off their frames.
A hive waking—
misdirected, angry, attacking
the shadowed
under the claxons,
under the sirens.
Through the slits of curtains
we saw
people herded into vans,
people cuffed and led away,
people penned,
people executed by revoked asylum.
We saw people treated
as the supernatural beings
rising up from hell.
We saw red light bleed
out over panicked eyes.
The boss of uniforms
said it was him
who was being hunted
but he was doing what all
predators do,
camouflaged and preying
on the hidden helpless
praying
in the shadows.
J. P. Dancing Bear (Featured Poet, October, 2017) is co-editor for the Verse Daily and Dream Horse Press. He is the author of fourteen collections of poetry, most recently, Cephalopodic (Glass Lyre Press, 2015), and Love is a Burning Building (FutureCycle Press, 2014). His work has appeared or will shortly in American Literary Review, Crazyhorse, the DIAGRAM and elsewhere.
Photograph by U.S. Department of Immigration Enforcement (Department of Homeland Security).
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