By the Winners
by Alex Carrigan

New semester,
new history class,
new history textbook.
I’m always fascinated by these books.
A ten pound compendium of time.
Amazing.
The pages are a little too white for me.
The history looks too clean.
It’s only lightly addressing what happened.
It’s pure hindsight bias.
I’d have made the pages red,
if I’m to accurately represent the past.
I think the pages are too strong.
We’re alive because someone made it out.
Most subjects in the book didn’t.
I’d make the pages brittle,
like a dead soldier left in a ditch,
where the slightest tug will tear his limbs.
Such elaborate eulogies,
written after the bombs fell,
after the fires died down,
after the corpses were buried.
I better start reading.
We’ll be in here soon.
Just another entry
carefully constructed
for mass consumption.