We gasped first, air on a boy’s ear, when his mother called
him inside but he stayed. We hugged where the road
bends and signed our names on the back of our hands,
so that when smoke blew and the march flipped to
disperse, when knees crashed into pavement and mouth
bled, we could touch ourselves and be known still.
They teach you to you that revolutions are swift or that
they never are. That there are fire men and but men for
keeping it up. I wasn’t either.
What remains is ever what was meant to— the sky,
unclenching; the moon, cold and low as a cleric’s
absolution. What remains is us, if only the way in which
the body carries its bruise after the wound has scabbed.
David M. Alper’s work appears in The McNeese Review, The Bookends Review, The Fourth River, and elsewhere. He is an educator in New York City.
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