Apparition, Easter 2019

Did you bow your head in repentance
as you passed the brown man with rough
hands and callused fingers, the one who

rubbed oil on his mother’s feet,
braided his sister’s hair and promised both
it was not yet his hour to die?

Or were you the one who called 911
because a man like that spells trouble,
spells revolution, spells a meal

of fish and biscuits into holy communion
for the masses and believes healing
is a right not a privilege?

Who wouldn’t take cover when the soldiers came,
whispering suspect into their walkie talkies,
holsters already unclipped. Who wouldn’t run

knowing that man would soon
be crucified into different fictions
depending on body cam angles,

unless it was the women, the angry,
inappropriate women who demanded visibility
and wanted their murdered sons

raised from the dead? Who was going to
stop them from singing holy holy holy
as bullets nailed him to that tree?

Nancy Hightower has had work published in Entropy, Spry, Heavy Feather Review, Sundog Lit, Longleaf Review, and Drunk Monkeys, among others. Her first collection of poetry, The Acolyte, was published in 2015 by Port Yonder Press. In April 2018, she was granted a micro-residency at the Strand Bookstore by The Poetry Society of New York as part of their joint Poet-A-Day Project.