Alex Priti – a poem by Jude Neale
Alex Pretti.
ICU nurse,
thirty-seven,
hands trained to find a pulse
in the worst of it.
He stepped into a day like any other
and met the crush of uniforms,
a sudden storm of orders,
the street turning into a room
where he did not get to speak.
They came in numbers.
They came too close.
They drove him down.
Not restraint,
not caution,
not care.
Beaten.
Handled like a thing.
A body treated as permission.
The footage holds what they deny.
It holds the swarm,
the force,
the weight,
the kicking shape of power.
And then the shots.
Again.
And again.
After, they tried to seal the story
before the blood had cooled.
They said he was going to shoot.
They said they had no choice.
They said it quickly,
as if speed could turn a lie
into law.
But Alex Pretti was a nurse
He spent his working life
keeping strangers alive,
steadying panic with a voice,
lifting someone back toward breath.
What kind of country
makes a healer into a threat
and calls it safety.
What kind of state
is told to stand back,
told it cannot look,
cannot touch the evidence,
cannot ask what happened
in its own streets.
This is not confusion.
This is not an accident.
This is what it looks like
when force believes it is truth,
when a badge thinks it can rewrite
the visible.
Alex Pretti,
say his name the way you say human,
the way you say neighbour,
the way you say enough.
