I’m fragile, but I’m not that type of fragile.
I am delicate not in the way eggshells and champagne glasses are,
or in the way that flowers wilt so easily.
My fragility is like a bomb’s.
Destruction lives in my palms and when I hear of things like these
the storms inside surge.

I am a child, you tell me.
I must be uneducated regarding the horrors of this world.
I am a child,
a fragile one;
my brain can’t grasp the idea of having a bullet through it.

Maybe you’re right.
Maybe I’m wrong when I talk of corruption
as if it is a commonplace item,
an heirloom on a shelf in every American home,
as if it exists free of repercussion.
Corruption is immortal to consequence, is it not?
We are a society held captive to campaign donations
and crime
and the color red
and I am done.

I am a child, but this bomb went off
long before you told me my age would would defuse it.
Time is up for red.

This generation is made of children, and yes,
we are fragile.
We are fragile but unbroken and we will exist
louder than the gunshots that created us,
and staring down the barrel of a gun
is not on our agenda.