This REFUSAL poem was originally accepted by POETRY but was withdrawn by the author in protest.

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When water began to pour in from the ceiling I thought my neighbor
had killed himself in the bath. When he did not answer at the door.
When the ceiling over my bed collapsed a week later, the day laborers

hung another, lower than the first. What was I to do? The ragged burr
left by the machine of my imagination. That week a nazi knocked J.P. down
at the pride parade. ICE agents ate at the restaurant before raiding its kitchen. The Punisher

wore a blue tooth on every windshield. The argument came down
to this: the world has always been this cruel vs. today is worse than yesterday.
Which stance was more likely to make my quiet neighbor drown

himself upstairs? When the house was split into apartments they walled over doorways—
the corner of a threshold hung lonely on the northern wall.
The rooms smaller with each tenant, each thick, indiscriminate coat of paint. The bath is a cliché,

I thought, which made it both more and less likely to be true. I stood, confused, in the hall.
He had a package on the porch marked perishable. The witch hazel in the yard had just begun to leaf.
I knew what the police would do if they came and so I would not call.

Do you think I would have written this if he were dead? I have lost belief
in many things, but there are poems I will not write. I’ve lost belief
in irony, in nations (most of all), in narrative, the utility of grief.