Wet black rain streaked from a leaking sky,
marking every white thing I had
hanging outside.
how I scrubbed those sheets,
scrubbed and scrubbed,
then later gave them to a museum,
that morning hanging my sheets
I was hanging
them before the world.
My neighbor was humming in the yard
minutes later her guts lay outside her belly
and she shoveled them in as she died,
my brother in the house
his arms outstretched
his bones exposed
ran to the river with the others
to drown.

I know now pain contaminates.

You weren't in our dreams until
you cracked our heads like eggs off the side of bowls
burnt out children until
their fingernails peeled away from their hands,
we were women, children, and prisoners of war;
forced laborers.
We were not at the conference table,
we were not at the war.

Another species - combustible.

Black ash fell like dirty whispers,
scalding ash burnt us as we
spun in circles in that flattened town,
soft ash swayed onto our limbs as if there were
no violence in it,
like later you said you did it to save lives,
we were small after all,
down there.
Soft ash, black rain
and I was pregnant when it fell,
my child was born with a pointed head
and a tiny brain.

In the months to come I was nursing her,
thinking,
(even those who were untouched
were dying from it)
and I kept thinking,
what you could have done on the journey home
when you left us behind,
spinning, disintegrating, burning,
In the black rain falling.