“The American Nightmare, 1492-1863” by Elisabeth Vodola

Imagine this exhausted leaf a leg,
Cracking under the solstice sledge,
The curve not a drooping stem but a back,
Arched, excruciating, to the never-yielding plant.
If not this hell, a worse--an island, now frothing with resorts,
Then pocked with death camps sucking in a teeming cargo of screaming saints.

Oh god, expunge this vision from my eyes.
All men are equal: under this sun, they faint.