Chelsea Bombing
1.
First there was the magnesium flash
of sparks, then the spewed lightning;
bolts, screws, and wires fanning out
from an unknown source. The victims,
maimed and bleeding, running still,
were hoisted and dropped down
like debris the sky rains after
an explosion. And then there was
my conceit that this time the blast
was worse because it was merely
blocks away, not continents or days.
Our windows rattled with the news
that came in reverb waves and echoes:
random act, demented warrior, God's
conscript, divine belief. I fidgeted in
my bed, not shouldering the lame.
2.
His body curved on the pavement. Was he
asleep? His forearm wrapped in gauze
served as a shimmy for his head. The scene
was shrouded in mist with a passing lick
of rain. He had been human once
before he fell.
His father denounced him as a terrorist
and said he'd turned sour. His sister
recanted his stabbing of her leg. He worked
the fat fryer at First American Fried Chicken
before he fell.
His co-workers said he'd grown silent
but it wasn't the silence of angels, it was
the silence of living upside down, in cacophony,
cowering in an echo chamber of curses
and vows unraveling that only dynamite
could drown out.
Pissed himself o0n a doorsill, he reeked
of disappointment, the solace of heaven
shattered like a snow globe on the sidewalk,
dishevelment another sign of his impatience
for deliverance to what was holy.
3.
The city grid was rotated twenty-nine degrees
clockwise to true West so the sun nested in the cleavage
of buildings at the end of twenty-third street.
Once burly stones now glossed to slab
their sleek skin carried a faint rose sheen
mirroring the river and the solstice evening.
Manhattanhenge. Midsummer barged past us.
The year titled toward its shrinking. He was
a terrorist and we were victims. We were
terrorists and he was a victim. Distinctions
boiled off and the broad street flowed
back and forth from river to river, end to end.
Copyright Credit: Jonathan Wells, "Chelsea Bombing" from Debris. Copyright © 2021 by Jonathan Wells. Reprinted by permission of Four Way Books, www.fourwaybooks.com.
Source: Debris (Four Way Books, 2021)