Silver Nitrate
by Casey Burchby
Flickering figures run
Barreling across the screen
Toward a train to safety.
It's a man caught in a system,
An average woman,
Her sickly child,
All fighting uncanny anonymity:
Helpless with panic,
They make it to the station,
Dodging inevitable explosions
Into the arms of the happy ending.
But outside the theater,
It’s Hitchcock on fire:
Grotesque alien faces
Make explicit, specific threats
To tear you from your family,
To tear your family from each other,
Saying pull yourselves up by your bootstraps
Or you will see them all drown
Out on the open water;
Watch them all suffer
Across a fake border.
You are caught in a vicious riptide
Pushed back, restrained
Prevented from pursuing.
All that is holy to you
You watch a river rush past
With the force of money
Zagging in all directions
Just out of reach
Barreling across the screen
Toward a train to safety.
It's a man caught in a system,
An average woman,
Her sickly child,
All fighting uncanny anonymity:
Helpless with panic,
They make it to the station,
Dodging inevitable explosions
Into the arms of the happy ending.
But outside the theater,
It’s Hitchcock on fire:
Grotesque alien faces
Make explicit, specific threats
To tear you from your family,
To tear your family from each other,
Saying pull yourselves up by your bootstraps
Or you will see them all drown
Out on the open water;
Watch them all suffer
Across a fake border.
You are caught in a vicious riptide
Pushed back, restrained
Prevented from pursuing.
All that is holy to you
You watch a river rush past
With the force of money
Zagging in all directions
Just out of reach
Casey Burchby is a writer and arts administrator living with MS in the Sierra Nevada.