I don’t know a word that means what I feel
when this bag I am dragging everywhere–
like a pillowcase stuffed with nightmares
of bombed hospitals, flooded zoo cages, landmines bobbing in rivers,
faces of mothers and of children lost in shootings–
can’t hold one more horror.

Invent a word that means I can let go of these horrors
and stretch my aching hands and feel
weightless, even if it’s just for the few minutes between mass shootings.
No sane person can take much more. Everywhere
these horrors follow me like the moon or the river.
Invent a word so powerful that it banishes the nightmares

that haunt me in sleep and the nightmarish
images that appear when I try not to think about anything horrible.
They’re like ghosts of bodies found in trees after the river
floods. Is there a word for not being strong enough to bear the weight I feel? 
Do you carry it, too, everywhere
you go, all of the time? The weight of all of the shootings,

all of the crimes against humanity? The shootings
and the nightmares
everywhere
the horror
so we feel
like rivers

swollen, rivers
churning with debris? I read about a woman shooting
a mother through a locked front door. That mother’s death feels
more heavy because I’ve seen her son’s face. Another word for a nightmare
living next door is evil. Another way to say horror
is living in America. Evil and horror have lived everywhere.

No sane person anywhere
can carry such collective trauma much longer. I am a river
trapped under an atmospheric river of torrential horror
filling my banks to bursting. Each shooting,
each war crime accumulates in nightmares.
Invent a word that means what I feel

when everywhere there is shooting
and every day my sanity struggles in a river of waking nightmares
and fresh horrors, the weight of which I can’t help but feel.