The City So White It Is Ready for Ink

• Scanner broke at work so new poem not yet here (update: but now here)
• (t....h e...y p..t p..m I w...e in t....t)
• With an emphasis that I can't even if I wanted to today so it's easy to say this, but I am tempted to go to The Mall today to see what if anything foments at trumporgasm
• The meaning of genocide and the political stakes of naming
• Tanks for the memories
• Tonkining
• Trump is an idiot savant at playing the American id, I said yesterday to my kamalatarian colleague
• Dying of whiteness
• Indulge your jingo by torturing animals! 
• There is no difference between this shitty jingoism and trumporgasm jingoism
• A cracker could shoot twelve people on the mall tomorrow, I said to kamalatarian colleague yesterday, and if one person throws a milkshake on a cracker applauding the cracker doing the shooting the media will make the milkshake thrower the day's evilest human and direst existential threat to the Empire (update: if but New York Times columnists)

AUBADE FOR BURNING CITY

Ocean Vuong

South Vietnam, April 29, 1975: Armed Forces Radio played Irving Berlin’s “White Christmas” as a code to begin Operation Frequent Wind, the ultimate evacuation of American civilians and Vietnamese refugees by helicopter during the fall of Saigon.

            Milkflower petals on the street

                                                     like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright ...

He fills a teacup with champagne, brings it to her lips.

            Open, he says.

                                        She opens.

                                                      Outside, a soldier spits out

            his cigarette as footsteps

                            fill the square like stones fallen from the sky. May all

                                         your Christmases be white as the traffic guard

            unstraps his holster.

                                        His hand running the hem

of  her white dress.

                            His black eyes.

            Her black hair.

                            A single candle.

                                        Their shadows: two wicks.

A military truck speeds through the intersection, the sound of children

                                        shrieking inside. A bicycle hurled

            through a store window. When the dust rises, a black dog

                            lies in the road, panting. Its hind legs

                                                                                   crushed into the shine

                                                       of a white Christmas.

On the nightstand, a sprig of magnolia expands like a secret heard

                                                                      for the first time.

The treetops glisten and children listen, the chief of police

                                facedown in a pool of Coca-Cola.

                                             A palm-sized photo of his father soaking

                beside his left ear.

The song moving through the city like a widow.

                A white ...    A white ...    I’m dreaming of a curtain of snow

                                                          falling from her shoulders.

Snow crackling against the window. Snow shredded

                                           with gunfire. Red sky.

                              Snow on the tanks rolling over the city walls.

A helicopter lifting the living just out of reach.

            The city so white it is ready for ink.

                                                     The radio saying run run run.

Milkflower petals on a black dog

                            like pieces of a girl’s dress.

May your days be merry and bright. She is saying

            something neither of them can hear. The hotel rocks

                        beneath them. The bed a field of ice

                                                                                 cracking.

Don’t worry, he says, as the first bomb brightens

                             their faces, my brothers have won the war

                                                                       and tomorrow ...    

                                             The lights go out.

I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming ...    

                                                            to hear sleigh bells in the snow ...    

In the square below: a nun, on fire,

                                            runs silently toward her god — 

                           Open, he says.

                                                         She opens.