Matricide

03 VERSES IN THE WAKE

Independence Day: the President's pen bleeds
across three hundred pages—each zero burns
a mouth unfed, each subsection feeds

the petroleum wells. Alaska's tundra turns
to wound beneath the drill's metallic weight.
The diabetic woman holds her vial, learns

three doses left. Her kidneys cannot wait
while Congress pops champagne over the debt—
three trillion our children's blood will navigate.

The detained mother braids what she won't forget:
her daughter's hair through chainlink, teaching prose
of M-I-G-R-A, alphabet of regret—

this child will breathe the carbon monoxide dose
of citizenship. ICE gorges while SNAP erodes
to salt. The cupboards testify: nothing grows

in hunger's house. Senators toast their codes
of beautiful destruction, genuflect
before the bill that cracks like fracking roads

through Mississippi's spine. What they elect:
four trillion rising like a pardoned ghost
while emergency rooms archive the deselected.

The billionaire buys his third address, a coast
of private sand, while the last rural ward
exhales its final shift. Freedom's diagnosed

as formaldehyde—the taste of what we hoard
in place of care. The mother counts her pills.
The earth splits open. Democracy's scored

for harmonized destruction. The oil spills
through permafrost. The senators still call
it beautiful, this way a nation kills

itself with pen and process, protocol
that makes the poor pay death in monthly bills.
They reconcile the ledger. Bodies fall.

Poet's note on "Matricide"

I titled the terza rima poem "Matricide" because this Big Beautiful Act represents America killing its own mother—not just Mother Earth through Arctic drilling, but the very concept of government as a nurturing force that feeds the hungry and heals the sick. On Independence Day 2025, the President signed legislation that will strip healthcare from 10.9 million Americans, many of them mothers who will die from rationing insulin or forgoing chemotherapy. But beyond these literal deaths, this is democracy committing matricide against its founding principles, perverting July Fourth into the day it codified abandonment. When senators call it "beautiful" to deny children food assistance, when they toast champagne while rural hospitals close their maternity wards, when a mother in detention teaches her daughter to spell "M-I-G-R-A" through chainlink—this is the mother country devouring its young, killing the maternal instinct of care that makes a nation more than just borders and budgets.

The poem asks: What kind of independence is it when we declare freedom from compassion itself?