Numb, I'm always staggering between migraines and my heart, small-large, like Alice in Wonderland. Marley shot Sheriff John Brown with lyric bullets but he didn't shoot deputies. You've juried sheriffs’ deeds—and say sheriffs work hard; in split-seconds decide lives. I recall hound-led slave catchers bloody brutality by design, like a tough truck, 400 years American Made. Sheriffs shot Avery Cody's back, riddled like old shoes, stiff, holey in Compton's Big Donuts, Hub City, the L.A. county heartbeat called a backwater— No video shot when sheriffs kneed Darren Burley's black back, a knee near his neck, SNAP—like when granny euthanized chickens for dinner. Sheriffs wrestled a woman shooting protests. Shouts—FUCK POLICE, closed banks shuttered stores. Sheriffs self-investigate spin yarn like Guatemalans weave huipils on fine backstrap looms. White nativism doesn't much change old John Brown's body lies moldering in his grave, the Abolitionist who said perish human race foes. I shout HALLELUJAH, shoot sheriffs, pierce their stiff souls, and light them once again with cameras.
Ron L. Dowell holds two Master's degrees from California State University Long Beach. In June 2017, he received the UCLA Certificate in Fiction Writing. His poetry resides in Penumbra, Writers Resist, Oyster Rivers Pages, and The Poeming Pigeon. He's a 2018 PEN America Emerging Voices Fellow.
