after the execution of Orlando Hall 11/19/2020
Day has come
a man is murdered by our country, it is
federally done.
Gone and somehow they didn’t
print the last meal in recent
issue of The Sun.
From my soul I need to know if he was
full, if the bison was smothered
in Land-O-Lakes,
from a local slaughterhouse. Is this killing urgent?
And the world doesn’t need a public
gathering, hills
from here to Terre Haute were open for everyone to
watch the lethal injection. His last words made me
look at the sky.
All his words made me
think: Is he still the man he died as?
I can say well,
safely, so many see him as all those decades ago. That man
like the rest—
all of death row condemned to their
final goodnight.
Alexis Ivy is a 2018 recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Poetry and the author of Romance with Small-Time Crooks (BlazeVOX [books], 2013), and Taking the Homeless Census (Saturnalia Books, 2020) which won the 2018 Saturnalia Editors Prize. Her poems have recently appeared in Saranac Review, Poet Lore and Sugar House Review. She teaches in the PoemWorks community and lives in her hometown, Boston.
