Hope Wabuke | Figure 1: Ruth After the War Still Dreams of Things Like Angels That Shield Men From the Firing

Hope Wabuke is a poet, writer and assistant professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. She has won awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, VONA, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund for Women Writers, and Cave Canem. She writes literary and cultural criticism for NPR.

Hope Wabuke's Website

Also by Hope Wabuke: Movement No.1: Trains The Leaving Legs

November 3, 2020
Poets Resist
2020 Elections
Special Feature

Hope Wabuke

Figure 1: Ruth After the War Still Dreams of Things Like Angels That Shield Men From the Firing

it is only the lack of heat the lack of singed skin & hair ashed to fill the nostrils in the coolness of the dewed morning air below the unfurled sounding of their winged rhythm rippling the air unfired that is remembered this the stuff of miracles that dreams are made of they never talk of how now you run from flame how you cannot cook dinner how you cannot see any color but red eyes stinging memory closed the inferno still blazes & you hear the cackling sizzle & you think you see your skin blackening pulled from your bones like a chicken on a spit crisped from the firing in these night sweats & shivered terrors these fever dreams constant & enflamed in this still loudening echo

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