Matthew Rivera
Matthew Rivera is a historian, teacher, and poet. His interests include the intersection of society and collective memory, religion, and LGBT identity and experience.
Reckoning
You lived in poverty
in a society whose corruptions you savaged,
they killed you as a monument,
like a black man who dared exist, strangled
by a knee in a public execution,
they killed you for status quo,
their Latin for power.
When was it decided—
when you overturned their tables,
did they start rationalizing then?
was it the doves breaking free,
the sound of Caesar’s coins
bouncing over cobblestones
that enraged them?
when the malls burned, could they only see their
status quo in flames?
Law and order looks like God naked and
nailed to wooden beams,
law and order looks like black bodies killed and
lit in red, white, and blue.
©2020 West Trade Review
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