Prelude to a Revolution

We go to prison windows and pass cigarettes, tangerines and iodine through the bars. Anything we think could heal a man. Assassins kiss our fingers. Mercenaries sing us songs about unbroken light as we mend their shirts. The bilingual murderers recite lamentations in one tongue, and in another, young myths. We fold and unfold our shawls, and the men squint into the sunlight, dumb with hope. Some days they confuse the walls of their cage with their skin. Some days, the sky. They see their deaths in the sweat darkening our dresses. To sweeten the hours we share scandals from the city, how curators removed an elephant's heart from the museum because it began beating when anyone in love looked at it, how the coroner found minnows swimming in a drowned girl's lungs. They ask if it's true, if slaves are chained together on ships to prevent suicide. We say they'll never be free. They warn us one night soon the judge will wake to find his bed alive with wasps, while across town the night watchman will stare stunned at the moths circling before he realizes he's on fire.