Micah Ling

Banksy

The people here hate the wall;
there are snipers in towers
and enough sharp edges
to slice every finger in the world
off. And if there were a pile of fingers,
bloody and cold, they would be painted
too. This is why the wall is painted.
People look at it: and because it’s painted
they see something. There’s a pile
of money in a man’s closet
because he had a dream:
stacks and stacks of money
and he believes that at the end
of the painting, anything’s true.

Micah Ling earned her MA and MFA at Indiana University. She teaches in the English department at Franklin College and in the MFA program at Butler University. Ling has two collections of poetry, Three Islands and Sweetgrass.