Our heads dip exhausted in the late afternoon sun.
We're driving the wrong direction on Miss America Highway,
trying to get home, so many sluggish hours away.
Repeating ourselves, caught by the movies in our heads.
Japheth's bloody, battered face. The police.
We recount the story to each other over and over,
trying to piece together how it happened
and what was lost in the whipping weeds,
what was lost as Josh screamed, howled at the man
in his red cotton jacket, his comfortable shoes, his fat-handed smugness,
that man so vile with a superior smirk, his creeping money-stench.
Blood on Japheth's face, and we gave ourselves up
to rage at the machinery that instills the ignorant
in our way, that inflicts the laws of morons,
that brings the officer toe to toe with me,
telling me it is a crime to swear, and I hear you say,
"What the fuck? When did cussing become a crime?"
But we are disorderly, we are loud, we are drunk,
we are wounded, with dislocated shoulders and crushed knees
and chipped teeth and swollen eyes.
We survived. We made it through. This time on our feet again.
We limped out of the wreckage and into the next day.
Though this debris is brutal, we can eventually bury it
with the bones of every other time the trigger was tripped
and we tore, seeing too clearly, into the wrongness of reality
with our teeth and nails, and came away wounded.
My brothers, my brothers. How proud I am to be your sister.

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