Butterfly Effect: Watching The News On TV While Arguing With My Wife

by Glenn Morazzini

     According to chaos theory the world is in a state of dynamic
     flux where all things are inter–connected, so that the flapping
     of a butterfly’s wing in Central America can set off a storm on
     the other side of the world.

While I glared, poured steel, at your remark,
a skull-tattooed gang member slit
a throat — school girl, walking home in Newark.
Words, a scream congealed in her mouth,
blood-spores on grammar and history books.

I said nothing, knowing silence abused you,
more of our visceral history, old spores on our grammar.
On the TV’s fast moving frieze, I viewed
a scared marine, checkpoint in Iraq, firing into sundown crowds,
cursing him with verses from their scriptures.

A lawyer in Chicago, fundamentalist Christian,
prepared a brief, as I fought myself to breathe the words.
He defended a coal company’s acid rain
wounding spruce and loons.  Meanwhile, rush-hour
London, an Islamic extremist boarded a train,

explosives inside a hollowed book in a daypack,
sat next to an Indian woman, red sari,
six months pregnant.  On a Mexican mountain, black-
and-orange wings slowly fanning, a Monarch Butterfly
shattered together my chaotic heart’s I am sorry.