A Sunday series from RVA Magazine featuring writers from Richmond and Virginia
Writer’s Block is RVA Magazine’s Sunday series highlighting contemporary writers working in Richmond and across the Commonwealth. Each week, we feature original poems, short stories, or essays. Just real voices writing right now.
Atmospheric Dread by Richmond writer Ann Marie reflects on recent events in Minneapolis and across the U.S., and how they reverberate locally. Through observation and memory, the poem traces the emotional weight of living through a moment marked by fear, authority, and disorientation, while still searching for something recognizable and humane beneath it all.
If you’d like to be featured, send your work to hello@rvamag.com with the subject line “Writer’s Block.”
Atmospheric Dread
There’s a distinct aura of trepidation here.
Uniformed men stand sentinel, armed with guns and power;
Neighbors stand vigil, armed with phones and whistles.
An odor of menace infects the air.
Some hide behind veils of secrecy,
Some hide behind masks.
Others hide.
Déjà vu crawls up my spine.
Raids, round-ups, ruses.
“Your papers, please.”
Shots are fired,
A woman bleeds out.
“I don’t care.”
Blood stains the streets,
The ice a slippery crimson.
“Reject the evidence of your eyes.”
Commands, screams, and silence echo.
“Reject the evidence of your ears.”
I try to eat but taste only bitterness and broken dreams.
We have been here before.
“He was following orders.”
We know better.
“He was doing his job.” “Absolute immunity.”
Is this better?
Something is on fire here.
It smells like burning books, maybe, or documents,
Applications or certificates or the Fifth Amendment.
Maybe it’s humanity that’s burning.
Perhaps it’s the land itself,
A place I used to know.
I am lost, disoriented.
I search for signs of familiarity,
Abundant skies and amber grain,
But the wheat here is diseased and
The skies confined and grey.
I look for purple mountains and popular sovereignty,
Search for eagles and optimism,
But come up empty.
The silent sentinels surveil.
I search and seek.
History keeps its eyes peeled, too.
The Mother of Exiles lights the way.
The search continues.
We still love that place;
We just can’t find it right now.
Photo by Sara Kurfess
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