"Where Are My Sisters Tonight?" by Suzanne Sunshower

A woman stands peeling road-mapped potatoes;
zig-zaggedly stripping life down to the core
of a root.
The square root
of a faulty existence.

Thousands of miles away,
a near-sighted woman with a far-away look
is gingerly stepping into mine fields.
She tip-toes through the muddy land,
scooping up precious, life-giving eyes to be properly buried,
so that they might see again in a different world. Elsewhere,

a woman is paring back the earth with famished fingers,
exposing the film in her mind’s eye of empty bowls lined up
like small, swollen bellies, or wide-open mouths
crying beseechingly for sustenance. In a hell

on earth,
a supine woman of the wrong faith prays for succor.
Body writhing beneath her captors, she waits an eternity
for a sign that the world knows her pain.
She wonders: Wouldn’t knowing mean caring?
Doesn’t anyone know?

A woman in Detroit watches at her window. She knows
there are young boys gathered on the next corner
waiting for their lives to begin -
for death -
for their next victim -
Where they once played ball in the street,
they now dodge fate enshrouded in a steel jacket,
still waiting for someone to call them in
from the storm.

Somewhere in America
a woman is washing brown hands under hot tap water,
scrubbing to peel herself free from the soul sins of the dead;
and of the living;
and of no one person
in particular.

Rain and Thunder

Where Are My Sisters Tonight?
by
Suzanne Sunshower