The Good Guys

Listen to a reading by Tim Foley:

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The Good Guys are building concentration camps in Rafah
and massacring civilians trying to obtain food.

The Good Guys are circling the planet with hundreds of military bases
and telling us we’re not allowed to oppose genocide.

Yesterday I saw a little girl playing
and I thought how nice it is that she has all her limbs
and that she is not lying still
covered in gray dust
while her father screams and cries
and calls out to God
while trying to kiss her back to life.

The world is changed now.
The moon is covered with powdered buildings.
The pigeons are weeping
and the wind sounds like drones.
Sometimes I cough and gray dust comes out.
Sometimes it’s a child’s shoe.
There’s a dead donkey lying in my backyard
that nobody wants to talk about.

The Australians chat about real estate investments
and how you can knock down one house
and replace it with two houses
and then make believe that neither house
smells like corpses.

The news man tells us the corporations
are just dumping the products directly into the Pacific now
while clinging tightly to the edge of the screen
so the black hole doesn’t pull him in.

Everything’s fine, the news man yells,
and the system is working perfectly.
We are the Good Guys after all.
We are, after all, the Good Guys.

_______________

Caitlin’s Newsletter is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

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My work is entirely reader-supported, so if you enjoyed this piece here are some options where you can toss some money into my tip jar if you want to. Click here for links for my mailing list, social media, books, merch, and audio/video versions of each article. All my work is free to bootleg and use in any way, shape or form; republish it, translate it, use it on merchandise; whatever you want. All works co-authored with my husband Tim Foley.

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Feature image via Ted Eyton (CC BY-SA 2.0)

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