Ryan McCarty
Disappearances
Any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind. —John Donne
When they murdered Refaat Alareer we filled the air
with kites, but for each of his poems burned, one vanished.
Now the skies are empty. Schools here will let out early
next year for every teacher marked up by the red pens
of snipers there. We may never learn again. Every mechanic,
shop keeper, weaver, or no-good-lazy-piece-of-shit
ended abruptly seems to have erased one of our Cub Scout
Den Mothers. Why them? Search for logic like God,
believing He’s there. For every Jenin torn from a garden
by hands shaped just like hers, one orthopedic specialist
will walk to the garage never to return. His checks will bounce.
My hometown is blinking in the white phosphorus pops
of missing persons reports. As the death counts roll,
one in three scratch-off tickets flutter to the ground,
hands clutching coins while flickering away. Famous
small town luminaries are snuffed out. The mayor’s wife,
cooking ham, thought she heard helicopters coming in low.
A ceiling fan chain’s clinking in time with the smoke
detector when her husband comes home. A lawnmower
at the end of the block is running, no sign of our old
football coach, just one circle of grass burning
under the chugging blade. We are each made, more or less,
of thirty trillion cells, specks that could drown one for one
in the number of tears cried lately. We disappear. Together.
“This piece was a slow build, as unfortunately drawn-out as the attacks on Gaza over the past year. I wrote a few things about Refaat Alareer’s murder, and a lot of things about all the people dying in Gaza, and as more and more built up, so numerously and facelessly and namelessly, I started to wonder about the effect that loss on such a scale has on all of us. So much dying must be killing us too, right? That question became the poem, and the mention of teachers conjured Donne back from my own high school teaching days. I looked around my neighborhood and pictured all of us disappearing too.” —Ryan McCarty
Ryan McCarty is a teacher and writer, living in Ypsilanti, MI. His writing has recently appeared in Blue Collar Review, Door is a Jar, Rattle Poets Respond, and Trailer Park Quarterly. He also writes at Politics of the Kitchen Table with My Family Crafting Nearby: https://ryanmccarty.substack.com