On the Morning of ________’s Execution

By Rachel Richardson

Could there be one minute more of singing
anywhere over the whole dry earth this morning? Angola is a giant

mousetrap, inescapable, the warden says, with four clamps
in the four directions: Something always gets ’em.

Heatstroke, gator, snakebite, a bullet.
The best thing I know to ask for

is one minute, and what would that do?
When Jay held me in his dark room with the door closed

one minute more, what did it accomplish? Who was less wounded
because our bodies met? Still, all the protests

beg that stay. Only stay.
There was a night

in another country when a woman called to the man
who could not be her husband and brought him to her bed.

She was already beginning to show.
She would drown herself in the well come dawn.

But that night—her lips like a small bowl, her manner polite
till the last—that night she brushed her swollen fingers

from the high bone of his foot up the legs;
she wrote a log of the body through the vessel

of the body.
I am inventing what happened in her bed

out of a protester’s need for rupture: that to add
one minute might change the larger course

of time. Might lead that man even now being strapped
in those crossed leather straps to the chair,

even now being readied to clasp his body to its planes
in the final heaves—in some fifth direction

out of the jungle, off the prison grounds named
for another country. This trap might be our mistake:

someone’s belief in the narrow options
of a compass. In heatstroke. And what beyond

the last degree?
Another minute.

A story is not the way to end a story
that tries to unstrap a man from a chair. A story leaves him

listening, bound. But all I can offer is what I imagine
of that low bed, where the woman had mashed

honeysuckle into the sheets. Where she led her love
by his solid hand. He who would never tell.

Or,
if you’d rather, I’ll end with the story I myself

lay down to, with my own lover, night after night,
not because I believed in its narrative

but because everyone outside wanted to kill something,
and if I stayed in here—if I stayed with you, Jay,

perhaps I would not.