By Kimberly McElhatten

Just west of Schellsburg on Route 30
night shoots up the Allegheny Front
where dozens of activists—men, 
          mothers, and 
                  little children—
clear Lookout Point Mount Ararat
by foot. 

They have come seven hundred
miles from Milwaukee
along the Lincoln Highway—
          tired of asking for justice. 

          While walking the roads through Indiana, police 
          barred their access to gas stations for restroom breaks. 
          In Ohio, people driving by threw food. 

In Pennsylvania, 
just west of Schellsburg on 
the highway—
          it’s the kind of response they had anticipated.  

Just one mile ahead, sit before them, 
actions more complicated than
          life and death and good and evil, 
                  where you don’t
                  see a lot of black 
                  people and there’s a 
                  reason for it
                  because they’re not
                  welcome—

one mile ahead. They’ll break
a little too long, in this  
          rural part of 
          dark, dark, dark, dark 
          Pennsylvania, 
and a man will walk 
up the Lincoln Highway, 
          shooting in the air—
          shooting in the air.

Then— 
he will snap
a warning and 
spray buckshot [not] like a firehose
into the men with
          —mothers and 
                  little children.

One mile ahead, 
          the eyes of all people will be upon
          exiles in their own land.

*Words in italics have been taken from newspaper articles and eye-witness reports, as well as Martin Luther King’s speech, “I Have a Dream,” and John Winthrop’s, “Dreams of a City on a Hill, 1630.”

~~~

Kimberly McElhatten is a poet with work in Anti-Heroin Chic and Bridge Lit Journal. She’s on the editing teams at Brevity and The Fourth River and chairs the WCoNA Book of the Year. She’s a past participant of the Tupelo Press 30/30 Project and the Fallingwater Residency in Nature and Place-Based Writing. Find her at www.openroads.life.