The Brown House

A State of the Union

A man was shot for being soft in a hard country,
his blood a signature on legislation no one wrote,
and the ice spread slowly from the capital outward,
freezing first the hands that reached for help,
then the mouths that tried to name it.

You’ll be next.

The devil came in a red tie,
golden hair like a piss halo melted into vanity,
and he rolled back one hundred environmental protections
like pulling blankets off the dying
the Arctic opened to drilling like a body
spread for profit, for extraction,
for the slow murder we agreed to call progress.

We have watched the House go brown with rust,
with the slow corrosion of words that once meant something
liberty, justice, crumbling like paint in summer heat.
The men in the brown house call it order.
The ice calls it nothing at all.

He separated families at the border,
called it zero tolerance,
which is another name for cruelty,
Mothers screaming in languages
the devil refused to translate
their children in cages, in foil blankets,
while the ice crept into detention centers.

He pissed on the constitution and called it rain,
torched the economy on his way out
and walked home with a billion in his pocket,
smirk that said what are you going to do about it
while you count coins for groceries.

You forgot the thirty thousand lies,
each one a small ice crystal forming
in the national bloodstream
the virus will go away, he promised,
while bodies piled in refrigerated trucks,
while the devil golfed,
while the ice took grandmothers,
essential workers, the man with soft heart
for this hard country’s plague.

Now you ask what are we gonna do?

The answer, it turns out, is nothing.
The answer is a man who will not come home
and a mother’s wail turned to vapor in the cold.

771,480 people sleeping on streets
in the richest country ever built,
while the devil cut housing funding,
criminalized sleeping outdoors.
The ice doesn’t ask permission
it simply takes the unsheltered first,
the way it was designed to do.

Is sleep so sweet?
Is the pillow so soft, the blanket so warm,
that you can close your eyes while the ice takes
another house, another name,
another boy too soft for this hard country?

They can’t murder everyone!

27 million uninsured,
while the devil tried to gut the Affordable Care Act,
60 million with mental illness,
6 in 10 receiving no treatment,
because care costs more than bullets,
because the devil needed those billions
for walls, for the golden palace where he keeps his secrets.

This happens on your watch.
This happens while you scroll,
while you sigh, while you say

someone should do something
and mean anyone but you.

The devil pardoned the insurrectionists,
the ones who beat police officers
with American flags turned weapons
he called them patriots,
while the ice formed gallows,
while you asked what one person could do
against such magnificent destruction.

Democracy’s coffin dressed in flags,
lowered into ground that was never holy
only frozen, only yours,
only waiting to see if you loved
the sleep more than the waking,
the comfort more than the country,
the turning away more than the turning toward.

The devil is laughing in his golden tower,
watching you choose the pillow,
the blanket, the warm forgetfulness
of thinking someone else will save you.

But the man is still dead.
The mother is still wailing.
The ice is still spreading.

Do something!

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That’s all from me, your turn to ask what if.

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Thank you for reading my work! Hi, I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself! I write poems when I’m angry, fiction when I’m hopeful, and dystopias when I’m paying attention.

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I am a published writer. Curriculum of Feelings is a haunting, six-part journey that spans centuries and species, a visceral exploration of the “Problem of Evil.”
Through a collection of short stories, you follow five distinct vessels: a poetess silenced by her world, a slave who finds freedom in language, a tree that witnesses history’s worst acts, a whale carrying a dying song, and a boy tracking a collapsing future. Each life is a lesson in humility, humanity, and pain.

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