On-screen The Killer is any active shooter
white boy with greasy hair, and I’m bored.
In the dream your hands are very large.
It’s 3 AM, and I’m on the phone with 24/7 customer support
just to talk to someone. No, because you reactivated
our Streaming Service™, and it overdrafted my account.
And the always-insomnia. How uninteresting,
all of this. The unchanged password regret.
A dream of Antarctica and not a single penguin.
Only freezing to death. Yes, I am lonely and can’t sleep naked alone.
I got thousands in my pockets, you said.
How much money you working with?
I still purge when there isn’t food in the fridge.
Maybe that answers your question.
See, a child draws a parent with large hands
when they’re being abused. I was never
bruised, but you’ve made your threats.
Shan asks if you could be bluffing.
I’ve never been kind enough to lie. I need friends to feel concern—
when they find my body there won’t be all this whodunnit.
Spare me the hour-long premiere;
save my only eternal soul from a 10-episode season.
A butterfly is powerful because it eats shit and dies.
But not before it crosses every border.
I’m just trying to cross over the curtain—or
maybe I’ve given up suicidality.
Paddington Bear feeds me marmalade
and teaches me the word for rain. Lluvia.
A sunshower in Portuguese is a fox’s wedding.
No, it’s o casamento da mariposa.
A pun is also a nightmare, see?
Anyway, they say wanting to die exists on a spectrum, now.
God’s promise was a rainbow.
Your door-door idiots think it was the dove.
The sprig of olive. Ultralight beam.
Dumbass, the ghosts are already here.
God, His throwaway son. My cat pins them against the glass.
My superstitious ass can’t stand a soul in flight.
Showing off, showing up, showing out.
I’m already damned
for accepting His bread-body on my unsaved tongue.
Child-me always dreamt of drowning
and wet the bed. All because two secular bastards
never sprinkled water on my head as an infant.
The passport photos were tough enough.
Give me your wailing birthright citizen baby.
Restrain her for her Documents.
This part is not a dream: you wanted me to join a cult.
Beyond the cult of this country, I mean.
When I said I wanted to die I didn’t mean I wanted you to kill me.
Yeah, I’m a fucking rainbow. Bent beam of light.
Refracted promise. Lying dyke—
your words. Your large hands. I loved your forearms, most.
Tattoos in Old English. The gun violent
are first victims of gun violence.
We’ll always have our hatred of White America.
You, joining The Nation. Me, on my knees,
throwing up this cracked porcelain country.
What name have you chosen, Brother?
What should I call you when you come armed?
You will call me whitey. Not lover,
not beloved. Death To. I guess I asked for this.
My fish-eye lens anxiety, my still-beating heart.
You said you were a serial killer—I didn’t listen.
Felonious. I tilted my head towards its outlaw music.
In the end, Satan was a woman, so play me out.
Here comes the synthwave, and there I go—
lifeless and most-beautiful.

Kim Sousa is a Brazilian-American poet and open border radical. She was born in Goiânia, Goiás and immigrated to Austin, Texas with her family at age five. Her work can be found in Poet Lore, Rogue Agent, Apogee, Blunderbuss and elsewhere. She has poems forthcoming in Pidgeonholes, Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review and Duende, among others. In 2019, Kim organized and participated in Pittsburgh’s all-Latinx chapter of Christopher Soto, et al.’s “Writers for Migrant Justice” nation-wide protest reading series, which benefited Immigrant Families Together. She also co-edited the benefit anthology of immigrant and first-generation poetry, No Tender Fences, which supported migrants in crisis by donating 100% of its proceeds to RAICES Texas. She is currently at work on her first full-length manuscript and at home again in Austin, Texas with her two senior pugs and her familiar, a black cat.