FLORICANTO ISSUE Tara Betts   GUNFIRE & SNOWFALL When I reached my 37th new year, computers, televisions & radios announced the levies against blood, six lives gone, and a congress person, who does not look or talk like me, even before the calm of her skull was shattered. Don’t retreat. Reload— two imperatives exercised by mercenaries prowling corrugated fences speckled with spilled blood in Arizona, a state seceding one law at a time. Gabrielle Giffords talked to constituents in a grocery store parking lot when the bullet coaxed into crosshairs was invisibly engraved with TERRRORIST, stanched by intern Hernandez who would not stop holding her hand. His other hand holding together the melee of her head until ambulance, until newsbreak, until surgeries, until shock subsides. I pray silently toward the crinkle of radio static. Blood warms my throat into gurgle, a drowning metallic red inside. Looking at tragedy through someone white and elected makes this easier to understand and empathize, right? Her husband on television is a man watching his wife hold on to breath’s delicate paper. She cannot use words to fill space between them, so she touches his wedding ring. From her hospital bed, she rubs his neck as she’s always done when he worries. I consider my own husband born between two islands— one choked by embargo and the other with birth certificates and wombs that America has never been bound to respect. Consider me as wife born from Tennessee & Cairo blacks just barely free & French immigrants who did not pass on language to their now American children. There are small brutalities every day. Consider us brown married folk, thinking that world does not expect our loving and prefers to dwindle away our existence daily. Some of us know death threat echoes so well that we keep going to work, organizing, & raising families—like Albízu & Laura, Betty & Malcolm, Martin & Coretta, Medgar & Myrlie. How Gabrielle & Mark lead me to dwell on the free speech of supremacy filling chambers and firing. I consider wedging the butt of a gun into my shoulder to protect the man who’s hand I rub with one thumb until I pull my coat’s collar up and open the front door. The frail snowflakes make me drop a veil of violence They permit me to stop holding my breath in the cold. Written on February 4, 2011 for the Floricanto in DC: A Multicultural Response to SB 1070 AWP 2011, True Reformer Building, 1200 U St., Washington, DC Tara Betts is the author of Arc & Hue, a Cave Canem alumna, and a Lecturer in Creative Writing at Rutgers University. Her work appears in Callaloo, PMS, Essence, Ninth Letter, Crab Orchard Review, and Gathering Ground. Her website: www.tarabetts.net   Published in Volume 13, Number 1, Winter 2012.