Stepping off the CTA 66 bus
I cross Chicago Avenue,
pass between tidy
farmer’s market stalls
and enter the Museum of Contemporary Art gift shop.
After purchasing a couple Keith Haring stickers,
I ascend the stairs,
snap a quick picture of skateboard decks arranged with
Andy Warhol soup can prints in different primary colors
I stop to pay admission
drop my backpack at the coat check counter
on the latest Democracy Now
podcast episode
where
Amy Goodman interviews
Jean Guerrero, author of Hatemonger,
they discuss the mobilization of
the California National Guard and
700 Marines from Camp Pendleton
to quell the
anti-ICE
protests
in Los Angeles
Stepping toward the spiral staircase where
Natural light twists down the
white
walls
I am arrested by
Malcolm Morley’s painting
A Death in the Family
whose loose forms
created by thick splotches
of pink, teal, and blue paint
on dark swaths of black, gray, and brown
engender a scene of mourning
a family stunned
after the loss of the son in a drowning accident
(The placard informs me that the novel by the same name, written by James Agee,
depicts the grief of a family after the father is
killed in a car accident)
–and I feel this loss
feel the shattering
from the inside into
blobs of uncontoured grief as I
listen to the Goodman’s stories of fathers
being
ripped from
their families by
masked
ghosts
taken from their homes,
their jobs,
from the coffee shop–
like Morley’s painting– this country
is at once seething and unrecognizable, a mess
of flesh, bone, and hair splattered across

a wide boulevard

the stink of tear gas and vomit
lingering in the air