after the 2024 election

Halloween in Texas and a mother
dresses her daughter and her daughter’s
stillborn daughter in the costumes of the living:
beautiful dresses, gold jewelry, painful shoes
to impress the unnecessary audience of dark.
In Tennessee, the floodwaters are still receding,
changing the map. Across the world in Palestine
they draw a border like a fate-thread, America
lending a knife. After the election, my mother says
try not to think of it as hate while in Alabama
my brother peels a Pride flag from his bumper
like a scar and a soldier at the edge of Arizona
guts a hidden stash of water, imagining a child.
My father says it’s the economy, a desperate people.
And after all, what is love to the god of property.
Nothing personal. Just good business. A loan.