Breaking [News]

I’m not a poet anymore—
I’ve interviewed too many politicians.
All they care for is ghosts.
Breaking news, I’m breaking
up with my stupid shame.
I have dates on my calendar
just for fucking. I do this
between my 9-5. Hello, hello.
I’m quieter than I seem.
I’m a man in a suit.
Please pass the damn hookah. 
Please tell the magistrates
I’m tired of reporting.
My desire to fix this window is corrupt.
Your desire to call your looking
through this window
an act of social justice is corrupt.
At a protest, a white woman calls me fake news.
Okay, fine, I tell her back. I don’t smile
anymore. I do the job so well
I outcry the eagles. I outrun
the sad. I trouble
my brain into a blender
then hand you a cup.
My mother holds a butterfly
to the sky.
White winged glimmering mess.
Someone, please, snap a photo.
My shoes are drenched in blood.

Copyright © 2021 by Noor Hindi. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 22, 2021, by the Academy of American Poets.

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“I’ve been fascinated by the relationship between poetry and reporting for a long time. Can poetry act as a piece of media, as news, as a document? In reporting, what bodies and whose bodies and lives are left out? What is sacrificed in these channels of communication and acts of storytelling and who gets to decide?”
—Noor Hindi