All of Us Running
Sarah Wetzel

After Freedom of Movement, a video installation by Nina Fischer and Maroan el Sani
 
Consider a man running:
a man running through the center of Rome.
He passes the Colosseum, circles Circo di Massimo
running down and into and out of it
through the Arch of Constantine.
Consider him carefully.
His feet are bare
as he passes the triumphal arches.
Rewind and replay the footage
of a man running.
There are men in chariots,
men on horses, men on motorcycles
escorting him.
A man on a motorcycle paces him,
chases him. The man running
is shoeless, his legs, dusty.
His feet touch the ground
and then lift off.
He is a aloft, held aloft
on a strong wind or a winch
through his back.
Consider a man running.
Consider the look on his face.
There is a dog.
Sometimes there's a dog.
There used to be many dogs.
He is aloft and running in air,
legs churning in air.
He is running for food for water for furniture
he is running for refuge for rope
he is running from machine guns and machetes
he is running from emptiness
toward an even bigger emptiness
filled with our sound.
Past the Protestant Cemetery, past
the Tomb of Priscilla, the soles
of his feet
strike and strike and strike the ground.
Consider a man running.
His shadow passes over the earth,
disappearing as if into it.









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About the Author: Sarah Wetzel is the author of River Electric with Light, which won the AROHO Poetry Publication Prize and was published by Red Hen Press in 2015, and Bathsheba Transatlantic, which won the Philip Levine Prize for Poetry and was published in 2010. A PhD student in Comparative Literature at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York, Sarah also teaches creative writing at The American University of Rome. You can read more of her work at here.

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