The color of chestnuts, something like a  Galician,

pushed to white, lightly singed, bronze.

In the streets of Rio there is a festival that falls

on the skin and it is ripe like the music bubbling

over into gait and speech and casual glance,

in the everyday atmosphere of being in the land

of pandeiros and cuicas. In the land of toasted,

murky, wheat, the dark dark, the heavily dyed,

the president vows to dig graves to stop crime.

A boy with a knapsackfull of maconha and crack

is shot in the back and the officer involved is out

on the beat the same day. The ambushes continue.

Snipers in helicopters target suspects. More and more

operations granting a license to kill the purple,

the burnt white, the café au lait, the sulphured,

the Amazon half-breed with red curly hair.

The Red Command and the Pure Third Command

battle over turf. Officers go on psych leave and

swear their sweat smells different after combat.

The president settles his debates by referring to

his handgun emoji that was a symbol of his

campaign. The chocolate, the cinnamon,

the almost-arrived-to-dark are waiting to join

the drug trade's ranks. The lilac, the beach

burnt, the honey-colored plan their attacks.

Forgive me, mom, you raised me well, but I want

revenge on the police. Later that month

he's shot dead and his honey white, burnt yellow,

dark nut family members said it was

already too late when he announced his pledge.

Maybe in some distant land black lives matter

but here they don't know a soul who thinks of

himself as black. The navy blue, the dark snow,

coffee-colored, color of the gourd don't take to

the streets to repair what commonly happens.

The burnt rose, blue, the dirty white, the mixed

will vote them in again and double down on

the violence. The land of cavaquinhos and

sete cordas vibrates through the storefronts,

tucks itself into alleys and bounces off of cliffs.

The light-skinned apple, the somewhat dark,

the color of the blue thistle turn the color of fear

because they know all guns matter. All guns matter

in the swelter of an extraordinary cause.