Ours

PUUUfirst written in March 2012 upon hearing the news of a U.S. soldier
PUUUwho, while deployed to Afghanistan slipped off of base, went to a 
PUUUvillage in Kandahar province, and massacred 16 Afghani civilians

When I hear the news
About the massacre in Kandahar
About how sixteen Afghans were killed,
Shot, in their homes, in the middle of the night
I am standing in my kitchen, eating an orange
Peeling back the skin, and then tearing if off
In pieces that are as thick as human cartilage
And when I see the photograph of a boy
This boy, who is wrapped, in a blanket
Lying, there, in the back of a pickup truck
Lying across my computer screen dead
His face turned to the side eyes closed
And his feet, bare and still and resting
Side by side like he is asleep
I cannot breathe
And it is the middle of the night in America
And I know it should be dark, here, by now
So I am turning
Turning off my computer
Turning off the television
A light left on in the living room
Turning at the end of a hallway
To stand watch, between the bedrooms
Of my two sons both asleep
Safe, their faces facing doors
And roads that are far away
Far away from war
Or later when I cannot sleep
How I will turn over in bed to face him
My husband who was sent over there
To fight this Global War on Terror
And how I will always think about it
A pickup truck that boy and this globe
Half covered in war bloodied and ours.

Stunned

PUUUU PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Stalking from home
PUUUU to home, a U. S. Army sergeant methodically
PUUUU killed at least 16 civilians, 9 of them children,
PUUUU …early on Sunday.
PUUUUUUU —The New York Times, March 11, 2012

Saffron daffodils three and four deep
line the low-slung factory’s white-washed
wall like spectators along a parade route

watching as we wander to an art exhibit.
They have exploded three weeks early
and seem surprised to see our passing,

their breeze-tossed faces long rows
of ruffled O’s aglow in the spotlight
of the daylight-saving sun. We all

were stunned that mid-week morning
several oddly mellow days ago to awaken
to the Southwest desert’s weather skewed

toward winter Michigan, to children heading
for school in T-shirts and plastic sandals,
our spring relief reserved for late April

arriving in force in early March. It’s eerily
just like summer, with highs near eighty,
and as we walk I’m astounded by my body,

how it knows to bully my sullen disposition
to get over it as if I’d already survived
the blizzards, shoveling, and lingering slush.

But it’s also spring break and warmer by
fifteen degrees than Daytona or San Diego,
and last Sunday, even across the ice-cold lake,

short-sleeved Chicagoans shopped in droves,
and tulips in the short-fenced beds beside
the bus stops were already half-a-foot tall.

In sympathy I’ve warned my Afghani students
not to fall for this unseasonable withdrawal
of the arctic’s brutal jet-stream occupation,

that they likely haven’t seen the vicious last
of what assaults us every winter, what
most certainly will bewilder them once again.

this year

i heard it’s freezing in the rancho
saw the fog in the pictures
i’m on the wrong side of the border this year
for dia de los muertos
trying to channel my grief
into arranging vivid orange cempasuchil
homemade móle on a hand embroidered Mexican cloth
for my bedroom ofrenda
this time it’s personal that i’m so far away
now i know first hand there’s nothing therapeutic
about sending money to buy velas P flores P alcohol

everyone is bundled against the cold
huddled around the fire
i mouth the words of the rosario
along with the video call
as i sip my cafe de olla
they pass around a bottle of homemade mezcal
not enough room for all the flowers in the family plot
it’s one person fuller este año
our departed are much beloved

i’m warm inside
pero pagaría con mi alma para estar alla
como el año pasadoPU wrapped up in a blanket
stumbling home on numb feet as the sun rises

are there seasons
where you arePUUUU Tío
is it raining tonight in Mictlan?

Winter Haiku

Seventy degree
December morning. God, I’d
love some cold weather.
——————————————–
The north wind brings a
layer of black smoke over
the camp each evening.
Sometimes we cough and
sometimes our eyes get red. We
just keep on breathing.
Who woulda thunk that
years later we’d still be out
here coughing and shit?
Not the congressmen
who fought against the burn pit
bill. America!
——————————————–
Hindu Kush mountains,
snow-capped and rising above
Mazar-i-Sharif.
At any other time,
this would be one of the most
beautiful scenes ever.
Instead, all I can
think about is my hatred
for President Bush.
——————————————–
We cough because we
sleep next to always burning
tires and chemicals.
Years from now we’ll drop
like flies and Congress will be
confused as to why.
——————————————–
Desolation is
not even the word I would
use to express this.
Flying over what
used to be Fallujah is
heartbreaking for us.
By “us,” I mean those
soldiers who can empathize
with the citizens.
There is no way that
every person down there
doesn’t hate us now.
——————————————–
It’s like Groundhog Day.
You wake up. You guard your small
piece of Afghan land.
You go to bed. Then
wake-up and do the same damn
thing, every single day.
Never gaining an
inch and never giving back.
Just biding our time.
——————————————–
I like to read books
on Oysters and steak. Then go
eat gray chow hall eggs.
——————————————–
New Year’s Day marks the
midway point of our Iraq
deployment. Jesus.
——————————————–
First sunrise brings a
flight to Tallil. I see a
small boy waving up.
I wave down in hopes
that my gesture will keep him
from hating us all.
——————————————–
I got a popcorn
machine for our movie nights.
Now we need butter.
Why dodge mortar fire
all day, then watch films about
war? What is going on?

Spring Haiku

Lengthening days and
darker mornings. More dust storms,
more rockets coming.
——————————————–
We pretend that at
home there was tranquility,
while in our bunkers.
——————————————–
Sand sticks in places
the balmy breeze takes it to
and showers don’t help.
——————————————–
I hear the whistle.
Through the haze of desert
sand, their death prayers.
——————————————–
The spring moon lights my
path as a camel spider
hides in my shadow.
——————————————–
Spring rains bring mud so
deep it could suck the boot right
off your fucking foot.
——————————————–
Muddy fields of sand
the rainy season is here
fuck this fucking place.
——————————————–
Watching from the sky
the balloon shows them setting
up a mortar. Shit.
Send out QRF
find out it was a hookah
glad we didn’t shoot.
——————————————–
He’s planting his fields
while carrying an AK.
Why is he shooting?
I’d be mad at us
too if I was just trying
to work and then this.
Maybe mad enough
to shoot randomly at three
soldiers in a truck.
——————————————–
Miry fields are more
than a nuisance to pissed-off
troops. Synecdoche.
——————————————–
We crossed the spring hills,
in a tiny CIA
plane flown by a dude.
He wore a backwards
baseball cap and wouldn’t look
ahead at the “road.”
We skirted the heights
of the Hindu Kush, barely
making it over.
This shit ain’t fun no
more. I’m ready to leave this
FOB, maybe by car.
——————————————–
We fly higher than
the kites they fly below us.
I’m bored, so I wave.
They don’t wave back up
at the infidel. Maybe
it’s the big rifle?
——————————————–
Chris died just a week
before Memorial day.
Irony. That’s all.
——————————————–
The poppies are in
full bloom and I’m popping pills.
Please help ease my pain.
A hole in my gut,
medics, wet gauze to dry gauze,
I need my morphine.
The shakes, not shitting,
but I’m feeling amazing.
Thank god for poppies.
——————————————–
Maple syrup doesn’t make
cardboard pancakes taste any
better. Fuck this place.
——————————————–
Powdered eggs and a
rubberized sausage make up
our Easter breakfast.
——————————————–
Flooded rivers and
muddy fields and all day we
stay wet and angry.

What Binds Us

I spent twenty-six years
in the jungle;
I was thirty years old
before I kissed a woman,
the Vietnamese poet said
and stared at
the American veterans
as if amazed at
what he had kissed instead.

In the war, he said,
his comrades had covered
his body with their own
to protect him
from the bombs
so he could finish
writing his poem,
although now
in his country
he fears there’s no one
who will understand
the language
in which it was written.

The stars in the North Atlantic hide
for months behind an eternal dusk sun.
I can’t take comfort that we see the same stars
if I can’t see them at all; time passes
even though we’ve been apart for months
and the calendar says the days do, too.
Without the stars flickering or the hint
of clouds gliding through moonlight, I can’t tell.

I left Norfolk months ago and yesterday;
tomorrow, the next day, or ten years from now,
I’ll be home, greeted like Odysseus by Eumaeus:
a king returns to Ithaca and strings his bow.

Experimental Simulation of Joint Morphology During Desiccation

In the dried-up river bed of the Helmand the body of a husband lies dead on the

hot cracked dirt. The hair of the woman married to the husband hasn’t been

washed in days. Her arms flex and hook the husband’s lower limbs. Dragging

him makes each step the woman takes heavier than the last. Vultures hover her

salt trail. Vast is what they see surround her. The daymoon watches too. Night

never comes only more heat magnified by the hours, searing the thin flesh

between vertebrae C-6 and C-7. The woman knows she’s blistering. Letting go

of her husband is not an option she thinks of.

Second Deployment

Our agreement was
only one. I have
difficulty carrying myself,

I—weightless. Rising
to the crags. Old world vulture
alone I sail for hours in the sky.

I eat my home. A pile of bones.
I’ve learned to crack open
what I cannot swallow,
a lamb’s femur. I am

bone breaker. Soft tissue drinker.

I eat his words.
I’m now dust bather.
Silent blood tracer.

I am burial maker.
Tossed knuckle
scraper. Someday he’ll find me
by the bed
in a pile.

There will be a hovering
and a hollowing.
No welcoming home.

CO’s Canon

If the cadence may be regarded as the cradle of tonality, the ostinato patterns can be considered the playground in which it grew strong and self-confident.

His green duffel bag
could have carried two of me inside.

Near the opening a faceless angel,
I try: Dearest,

because I’m tumbleweed,
but he never reads me.

There are more important things
to do, shake hands with soldiers

going out on mission,
because when you’re the commander

it’s about survival.

I didn’t need to take
that last glance.

Suddenly tyrannosaurus.
Angel’s sepia teeth baring.

Someone is running, there,
just out of call.
We all hear the air beaten into waves,
the chopping blades. I am afraid
I will see a face, I will fall.
As it is the hand, small with distance
claps the air.

Listen, a bitter churning,
lungs roar, ragged like yours
on your morning run.
You are out of breath, we are out
here.

From blank distance the helicopters
return for another pass. I say,
Welcome back. Facts are your only friends,
they say. There is nothing
I wish to forget.

Dad

1950s father. Family man
as best he could.
Provided everything but
stories of his life.

I played army with his old canteen,
green backpack, wore his sergeant’s cap
in open fields, running bush to bush
avoiding bullets fired by Rick and Neil.

Nothing real about my war
No blood unless a briar scratch
Grass-stained jeans, home for supper
Pork chops, mashed potatoes, apple pie.

We liked Ike and flew our flag
Memorial Day and on the Fourth
No mention ever of the War
less than a decade past.

Eighth grade social studies essay question:
Did your soldier/father see combat?
I scrawl, No, he never left the states.
Didn’t watch men die. Or kill them. Not my dad.

He died of too much drink
Earnest citizen/father turning mean
though never loosening his tongue
to tell tales of army days.

Turns out you did see combat in the war.
Watch men die. And kill and kill again.
Your job: to fire fire into tunnels
where Japanese holdouts hid.

Creep slowly in the dark
nerves shriek, sweat stings.
Something moves! Throw your flames
Then hear screams and smell the burning flesh.

Did you sleepwalk through your life
wife and children just a dream,
stare at fireplace, Scotch in hand
while other ashes floated into focus?

The conversations I treasure with my father are when life is thick,
calibrated for someone with muscles, a la Arnold, circa 1970.

I don’t ask about the years sweating through C130 jet jammies,
the adrenaline squint and salt crusted glass like blinds, ripping lives
from frothing canines of rabid Bering Sea. The Memorial Day knells
and widows brine that drove him to coax groans from floorboards
into photographic memory of drab morning.

He doesn’t ask about the seams, healed to spiderweb white,
where the man who bound my finger in gold and stone, pressed
caustic knowledge into me until I driveled rust. Shrieks buzzing
like flies on pink fleshed roadkill, fermenting in oversized hoodies,
to manifest in sage half moons, under darting gaze.

We don’t talk about those things. We swirl coffee and cream.
We talk about the Boston cabby, with the bent nose and worse fender.
The enigmatic professor of poetry, who couldn’t say what anything means.
A poem is a poem. It means what it does.

In the deadlift static, we do nothing, curating mundanity.

In Oklahoma City, Another Air Force Spouse Tells Me Starlings Are an Invasive Species

The starlings swoop and
Fly in a union

To land on red dirt and
Daddy told me blackbirds

Carry disease and the images
Of my turbulent mood swings

Are blackbirds swelling
Their feathers in my chest

And I read that Females are
more likely to experience rapid

cycling and mixed states and
How come my disease does

Not swoop and fly in unison
But movements breaking my brain

Yet the starlings land like an
Electric current and a therapist friend

Tells me that ECT is different
Than The Bell Jar but the

Only sacrifices I’m willing to
Make are swallowing pills every-

Day and therapy twice a week
And according to the DSM-5

30% show severe impairment
in work role function and is

That why every job I’ve ever had
Gave me panic attacks and I

Watch the starlings fly
In a beautiful drove and I write

An essay about my moodiness as
Birds and another military spouse

Tells me that Pacific Northwest
Corvids are the smartest and

I wonder if the crow playing
With a yellow tennis ball

Is stability and the flock of
Starlings is what my pilot husband

Tells the passengers is
Rough air and if my

Brain will always be in
Flight when all I want is

To root in dark clay along the
Banks of the Mississippi and

Bury these moods in the swamp
And Carson McCullers wrote A most

mediocre person can be the object
of a love which is wild, extravagant

and beautiful as the poison lilies
of the swamp. And I realize

The learned love for my brain
Is growing like the annual

Peonies in the backyard and this
Brokenness is sinking into the Puget Sound.

I First Compared You to a Blue Jay

Three years before we met,
Friends tell me to stop reading
Virginia Woolf after my suicide
Attempt and an ex-boyfriend
Gifts me a burned CD of
The Beatles at Easter––

I delete and block all my exes
But I keep The Complete Tales and Poems
of Edgar Allan Poe and the Drew Brees
Jersey and tell my therapist I want to
Be a writer and my psychiatrist still
Won’t diagnose me––

In Oklahoma City, you sit quietly in the
DBSA meeting with me and count out
My pills and I keep all the voicemails from
Your deployments and now in this
Future I still question your apologies because
I can’t believe you still love me––

I watch crows rifle through an overturned
Garbage can and a woman in a DBSA
Meeting says not to tell anyone your
Diagnosis because they will use it against
You and the ice split parts of the mimosa
Tree in Altus and I tell you I won’t be
Going back––

Your hands find mine as the word
Disabled sits between us and the
Invasive bamboo is growing in our flowerbeds
Again and I confess the guilt because I
Need you more than you need me and
I’m reminded of the blue jay diving into
Trees and the lone cardinal is locked inside
Me and you have the keys.

Coming through US Customs from Ecuador
the passport agent asks if I have anything to declare.

I know he doesn’t mean the duty free,
exotic perfume or rare cigars.
He isn’t referring to bitter cacao or
sun-sweetened coffee beans.

What Was It Like?

Over-lit airport terminals

or the rifle range at night,
the first tracer

crackling in night vision
over pale green hills. Or—

a group of souls
preparing

to die together,

the plane shuddering
in its evasive bank,

our eyes knowing

for once
each other. Or—

relation based
not on preference

but direst need.

The livid explosion
we invited,

then flinched.

Thousands of miles.

Cadet
(West Point, N.Y.)

On restriction to barracks

for dereliction of duty
(otherwise known

as sleeping through classes),

you look beyond
the window.

Clad in gray
Civil War-era uniforms,

a broken succession

of nineteen-year-olds
walk through the snow

at right angles,

flinching at the chill
across their razor-burn,

the wind off the Hudson.

West of the river
atop Battle Monument

stands winged Fame,

her bronze pinions cut
into the overcast.

In your room
sits you.

A bit too warm,

the floor fresh-cleaned
with Mop & Glo,

dry-cleaned wool pants
hanging over

stacked tins
of shoe polish

in the congestion of New York
midwinter air.

You loved back then

to sleep, hovering
in un-location,

absolved until
the dread summed to

the impossibility

of being again
late for formation,

running cold water
then the razor

over that same
old rash—Now, somewhere

down the hallway

the boot-squeak,
hoot and snicker

of men making
their weekend exit

for nearby Newburgh,
the last door-slam,

that triumph

of silence
once again spreading

Zero Five-Thirty
(Fort Riley, KS)

From the hilltop down,

the base is rimmed by a crust
of bluish signs

glowing somewhat
appealingly at dawn—

pawn shops, strip clubs,
quick-cash stores.

The fragmented receptacles
for the nightly outflux

of dirty dollar bills,

leftover sand,
hard-ons and sweat.

Flitting between
blackout shades,

the vague milky secretions

of our half-drowned
dull and brightest, now

making their way back up
to formation.

Their bass-notes drift

across endless plains
of identical duplexes

where their families still sleep.

Sunrise comes soft
as a bloody nose.

Groups of men
jog past in squares.

In The Dead Man’s Seabag

On top of clean uniforms,
his Bible rested,
a well-worn photo
of his wife and two sons,

tucked inside with a letter—
We love you
and miss you.
Hurry home.

A blue ribbon marked
First Thessalonians,
where he had underlined—
Be joyful always;

pray continually;
give thanks.

River City

As you wait
for my promised letter,
I count the slowly flooding
minutes of condition river shitty,
like a meteorologist watching
a crest stage gage, helpless
to stem the overflow
as it breaches. I can’t reach
through this void, extend
my fingers to brush yours,
can’t lift and spin you in a hug.
An AH-64 Apache helicopter
encountered hostile fire,
casualties confirmed.
Waiting as the Army notifies
next of kin, I thank God
they’re not coming to you.
I pray for those in the way
of fate, grateful my destiny,
today, is only to make you wait.

Here’s to not killing yourself
P with DA issued narcotics
with Deer Hunting Rifles
PRecreation what life left
in forest PUUUin sand
Pin the White Throne Room
where you sat among
Pblood & brothers
and the Valkyrie your sisters
Pwhen you raised up your call
sign like a prayer
Pand called down hell
fire in our age
Pwhere our every battle is
ragnarok and you wept
Pwithout shamePU in salute
and the throng of well wishers

I am a part

the kind you met
at the arrival gate
shook hands and welcomed back
visitors
if there is anyone
Welcome Back
the kind that could mark
your wounds by
your inabilities
to speak to speak to listen
in anything but blast fragments
the kind that never knew
the certainty of steel
and the strength of the wild flowers
as you patrolled with men
and ate alone
for what company
is there in men?

leaving the divided house
Pand the black tent
the cry of the delivery room
Pand the shout of the bedroom
racing into the crackling fire
Pthat you mistook for sunrise
the distant moon
Pthat you mistook for friend
the laughter of wolves
PWe allowed to circle us in
and lay to rest
PWe refuse to rest

warring till our company arrives
Pwarring till our company arrives
warring for our company who holds the line
in blood and breath and life itself
here’s to not killing
yourself.

“This is what he signed up for,”
my mother says when
my brother graduates from West Point.
He always wanted to be a soldier,
so she and I pin the bars on his shoulders.
He’s twenty-two, we’re fighting two wars,
and one will come for him in the end,
but first it comes for our friends.
Kills one in the summer, and then
it comes for my brother, too, and
takes all
the light with him.
His dawns are my midnights.
We talk over the noise of firefights.
For an entire year
I don’t sleep or write
because poetry can’t abide the war-
not yet-
The phone rings at 2AM, and
at first, I think he’s dead.
He’s not.
But he’s not coming home.
He’s going to Baghdad instead.
This is the moment I don’t forgive.
120 days of moments come after,
and years I spend trying to
recapture his laughter.
Sometimes, I look at him
and still see the war
that I never signed up for.

ONLY MUDDY BOOTS AND HELMETS CAKED RUSTING
ROTTING IN STEAMING GREENHOUSES STICK UP
FROM DECAYED REMAINS CAUSED BY DETESTABLE
HUMAN ANGER VENT BY WORLD POLITICAL
COMPANY FOUNDED ON INORDINATE DESIRE. STOP.
BLUE POWDER SMOKE SIFTS THROUGH THIN LIGHT
RAYS AMONG MANY OTHERS YOUR SON ARRIVED HERE
TODAY SHORTLY AFTER MORTAR FIRE
STOPPED ON PHENOM PHENH. STOP.
PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGOD

We saw a stain on the desert roadside.
The moist spot wasn’t from an emptied spit
bottle or a planned checkpoint alongside
the route to stop and relieve the unit.
It wasn’t a bloodstain from a gun fight,
where men and rifles roared and proved their worth.
It was diesel used to compact dirt tight,
to leave no impression of disturbed earth.
I followed my CO. He dug for the bomb.
I did not call for help or special gear.
I failed to think of a prayer or psalm.
I stood with him, too loyal to show fear.
He talked the whole time about his ex-wife,
said she’s the biggest mistake of his life.

Here is his daughter in a mustard seed bauble
bearing the initials M.S. And this is the hyena’s claw
that dug up ash-cloud & gold putrescent tooth
yet I had to ask, who, how many.

I was all trust and confiding hands. This is a snap of the destroyer
on which a body tried to come clean in hard water.
Here, too, memory’s ineradicable scum
rendered as the famous scream.

There is the miniature house where we four never slept very well –
was it only chance, the refugee street? We moved among them
death in the pocket, the cue ball rolling on felted grass.
These are the countries that stirred fear

around the fragrant globe, whole areas grayed out.
The affinity of heart with ice
a chicken stripped of feathers, candles for new blackouts.
In truth, M.S. sired no children but the wild mustard

boiled down for soap. Still, bees pierce yellow & lungwort
duple lobes which marry seed to breath, Everything
came of that nothing on the street of transliterated names,
gardens where none would bury psalm or song.

My brilliance is slow-growing as magma.
And that’s my fault, like the San Andreas:
consequential, but maybe not this year.

My brilliance has dimmed
in the silver drawer,
polished for company
who never comes.

Meanwhile, I’m cracking
Earth’s mantle way below,
and above, work shoes walk
dirt roads, or city sidewalks,
finding fault. Whose fault is it
when everything firm is now shaken?

Someday I’ll blow,
and carve a fiery blackening river
out of a tropical forest
to your door.

My urgency has waited
a thousand years.
Now I’m here.

We came to provide help that you didn’t want.
We came to provide security you didn’t need.
We came to provide schools that you didn’t care about.
We came to provide a government that didn’t work.
We came to provide democracy you didn’t understand.
We came to provide infrastructure you wouldn’t take care of.
We came to provide a better life that you didn’t ask for.
And we kept spilling our blood and couldn’t understand how you could be so ungrateful.

Experimental Simulation of Joint Morphology During Desiccation

Second Deployment

Our agreement was
only one. I have
difficulty carrying myself,

I – weightless. Rising
to the crags. Old world vulture
alone I sail for hours in the sky.

I eat my home. A pile of bones.
I’ve learned to crack open
what I cannot swallow,
a lamb’s femus. I am

bone breaker. Soft tissue drinker.

I eat his words.
I’m now dust bather.
Silent blood tracer.

I am a burial maker.
Tossed knuckle
scraper. Someday he’ll find me
by the bed
in a pile.

There will be a hovering
and a hollowing
No welcoming home.

CO’s Canon

If the cadence may be regarded as the cradle of tonality, the ostinato patterns can be
considered the playground in which it grew strong and self-confident.

His green duffel bag
could have carried two of me inside.

Near the opening a faceless angel,
I try: Dearest,

because I’m tumbleweed,
but he never reads me.

There are more important things
to do, shake hands with soldiers

going out on mission,
because when you’re the commander

it’s about survival.

I didn’t need to take
that last glance.

Suddenly tyrannosaurus.
Angel’s sepia teeth baring.

The President’s New Children’s Crusade

We are the mudweary
bringing the blossoms of death.
We are the Contras, the blessed,
liberty’s torching lames us,
we are the old children.
shredding night’s humid serenity.
bombs unleashed are our laughter.
we are the young men of war.

We are the death marchers
who slink through the mountain,
one endless serpent of soldiers
sent to strangle our enemies;
The president sends us
with his blessing, blesses us
with his sending, blesses
the bleeding.

There is no need for interceding,
for the Sandinistas
are infidels wrapped in red,
red in their wrapping;
rapping on doors in the night.
Contras are the bringers of light
rapoing indoors when we might,
we bring the light to the burning,
always discerning the right,
the right. After the bellies
are emptied of babies,
after the buildings are belching,
their flames springing higher
we scatter, no matter the plunder,
the thunder roars through the dark,
the spark of freedom is lighted,
ignited.

We are innocents marching,
we are the crusaders of death,
new life we bring our nation,
new breath, new salvation our message.
We have the president’s blessing
he sends us the blessing of rending,
his blessing is drowned
in the bleeding.

Detritus

You can tell me
that what happens
PUUUupon the soil
PUUUUUUUUUbeneath our feet
does not matter

that the violence –
PUUUgunpowder
PUUUbullets
PUUUlandmines
PUUUblood spilled
PUUUand rot of bones and flesh
does not affect the terroir

that the terror
over centuries
on land –
PUUUdisputed
PUUUand stolen
PUUUfought over
PUUUconquered
PUUUand lost
is not ad infinitum
buried in this graveyard
PUUUUUUUUUUUUcalled home

You cannot tell me
that what happens
PUUUupon the soil
PUUUUUUUUUbeneath our feet
does not matter

that the battles –
PUUUsweeping or contained
PUUUas enemy or ally
are not eternally captured in the earth
PUUUdust inhaled and ingested
PUUUUUUUUUbut also embedded
PUUUUUUUUUUUUin our collective consciousness
like a rusty compass
nestled in the palm of each newborn child
PUUUUUUUUUUUUits arrow clearly pointing
PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUto the forever trenches
PUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUof inheritance.

I can still see it.
I hit him with a burst from my M16.
He jumped up and danced.
Everything gray.
Bamboo stood silent
and lowered its leaves.
The earth stood still.
Breathe! I said.
Breathe!

We hike toward a waterfall cascading
through a split in the wall of rock above us.
A crow soundlessly slices a shadow
across the field of snow.
One breath, and the bird is gone.

At the tree line, the tail section
of an airplane, the metal edges ripped
and ragged, stands shiny in the twisted
alpine firs.
The engines lie in the shallow creek,
water pouring over cylinders.
Scrub cushions one wing, the other
is charred into rock,
the ground littered with pieces
I can hold in my hand:
aluminum with buttons, rivets, zipper
heads, upholstery, and jacket fabric
melted into lumps.
In one, the fingertip of a leather glove,
a bobby pin.
It happened in nineteen forty-eight.
A cargo plane clipped the ridge
in a blizzard. Six men died. One woman.
The color of her hairpin tells me she was blond.
The townspeople saw
a fiery flash in a night sky filled with snow.
In daylight, fighting drifts and high winds,
they dragged the bodies out in bags on toboggans.

This would be a good place to leave
your spirit. In the silence,
the wind breathes over the ridge,
and water trickles beneath a layer of ice
that turns blue as it melts into itself.
Gentians and Indian paintbrushes
in the meadow throw their colors
against the rocks.
And the delicate columbine, pale
yellow and pink, only blooms in August.

PUTTTI don’t know whether war is an interlude
PUTTTduring peace, or peace an interlude during war.
PUTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTTT-French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, 1919

Hurl of metal – iron, steel – as shrapnel,
as bail hail, as HE detonation, all
forged and spit out again with new fire,
matériel barrae, meat-mincer for
extruding the mortal mettle of mere men.
The sowing and the reaping are all one –
short is the harvest of those born to it.
After the wrecking, reaping, reckoning,
all are scuppered on the killing field,
khaki men with hopes of home snuffed out.
Sheaves of men scythed down mid the muck-mire-mud,
bowels churned with the disemboweled earth, red wet.
Gravity flows to the lowest reach, but not
here in the gorge of this blood-gutted earth,
saturated but not satiated.
On and on this crimson stain will drain,
young men will come to fill the gap – futile
like a record where the sylus is stuck
in the groove over and over again –
out of trenches to fatal, final ground.
They die individuals, but banal
as communally their yield is too large –
none a hero in this no-winners game
nor a tragedy – just raw statistics.
All that grieve them soon too, to oblivion.
After this Great War comes the entr’acte
before World War roman numeral II,
just in time for those who survived and bred
to lose their sons in the next harvesting.
Never an end, merely an ellipsis …

The War

“The war continues working, day and night.”
–The War Works Hard, Dunya Mikhail

It has a way of knowing people,
the way a night knows our stories.

Everything’s quiet, then you learn to fall,
deeply. It’s said how you approach an issue

says a lot about you,
PUUUbut how do you approach war?

Everything quiet – almost
at peace – when you learn to fall. Deeply.

And even the night changes its colour.
The dawn is difficult to accept.

Your palms have broken into little chips
of stone, which you will either throw

at people or swallow yourself.
In the kitchen, the water’s boiled, the pan

is ready for eggs. The child you sent out
to get some bread hasn’t made it back.

In the news: everywhere, the streets
PUUUhave learnt the meaning of blood.

Krakivets, Odyn

I wasn’t a medical volunteer – only came in with a backpack, an overweight suitcase,
all the baggage of the past eight months and a heart to pump into here
the ability to stop someone’s bleeding in whatever capacity and degree I could.

But that would’ve been too much nuance for that moment,
with me just being able to count to not much more than eight in Ukrainian
and the guard’s English and tone more apt to counting to three.

I’ve already forgotten some of the exact nuances of that moment.
Did the guard ask me through the open car door, over the empty driver’s seat in the dark, “What were you doing in Ukraine?” or something more like “What brought you to Ukraine?”

For almost a week? Your first time, with emphasis on now?
Incredulity, perhaps, that someone would choose to come to a war,
unarmed, at least in the Kalashnikov sense.

Was he holding such an automatic rifle, a worn cousin of the one I’d fired       in Texas -just precaution-or was it only a fellow guard I saw cradling the legacy of an empire chasing again the impossibility of restoring itself

by unloading                terror upon
and blasting                    through flesh
of people                           like him or me?

I tried to answer the guard’s questions but he got frustrated
and he waved us on to keep the line of hundreds of vehicles moving toward Poland,
as foreign fire engines and weapons re-supplies for firefights came in the other direction.

And with that, we crossed the line — after the Polish guards searched the car, anyway.
One side, the imminent threat of death from the sky above — and not on the other.

Those night skies, no light on the ground to obscure the stars or guide the drones.
I slept well, except when I cried myself to sleep the last night in Kyiv at the thought
of having to leave you, brother, in all this.

Your big windows in Lviv didn’t bother me much.
Neither did the lights in the sky out your windows in Kyiv,
lights that moved in the darkness.

Elemental

Hydrogen, the sun’s power
sends light 93 million miles
to give life to the sunflower
that stands for hope in all our trials.

Nitrogen and phosphorous, they make the sunflower fields more fertile.
When used in explosives and incendiaries, they add more shock and awe to a projectile.

Oxygen, the spark of life in my lungs.
I would give you the last of it from my chest,
my last breaths, if suited best,
for a continuance of your song to be sung.

Heavy stuff, uranium.
It’s not all gone as quickly as in a flash,
not for many or most.
Did I mention half-life with strontium-90?
Like calcium, it seeks bones as hosts.

Carbon, the basis of life as we know it.
If I had to, could I recall any debt to be owed it?

Could all I’ve ever sent off to be recycled
be traded to rebuild your body, your blood, your soul?
Enough to make you whole?
With enough left over to also recreate the man shot off his bicycle?

Our bonds are strong.
Between two hearts, two time zones.
Subatomic critical mass, but love more than chemistry and physics alone.

All I Can Do Is Watch

It’s 0400
on a bridge crossing over
the Tigris River.
Qayyarah is a town along its fertile banks,
15,000 people call it home.
I wonder how long it has been here,
how many times conquered
and rebuilt.

On the outskirts lies an oil field,
it’s where I live.
The wooden walls
of this makeshift bunker
in the sand
wouldn’t stop an attack,
just slow it down.

Surrounded by blackness,
my mind wanders valleys of homesickness,
forced to breathe toxic air,
flanked by those who want to kill
my invasive body, parade it
through the streets.

A bright light hits the oil field,
shakes the ground.
Movement on the hill to the north—
I call it in.

Orange flames rise in oxygen,
twirl in mirthful celebration,
the smoke swirling higher,
my life forever changed and
all I can do is watch.

No Way to Fight Back

I can smell the exhaust from
the plane that’s taking me home.

Standing in line to board the whale,
maw open wide to let us inside.

Air forming breath in the illume,
I’m done with moons in this hemisphere.

These stars, still foreign to me.
Even at the end, I know I don’t belong

in a land of sharp sand, the broken
glass bowl of democracy.

This land won’t let me leave, though.
Raining metal explodes my dreams of home;

swarming red flames engulf
the surrounding canvas. The sound

catches the light, knocks me flat
to the ground as alarms blare attack,

bullets ricochet off cold slabs.
And just like that, I’m crouched inside,

cold-cocked by the reality of
no way to fight back.

people boats

dreams swell/ lashed to circumstance in Syria/ in Gambia/ launched from Libya in leaky rubber chugs to birdless deep/ chugs w/ floor of feet w/ canopy of arms like 700 starfish sweating/ surfing demons/ keeling keening groaning spinning ferment/ tossed estrange/ the black moon sinking into raucous mucus maelstroms/ cataract of violet distress/ the turbulence of orange sun/ bursting over flotsom/ boats adrift/ boats repelled/ prison haulers fatal w/o water, w/o air fatal in shrieking rescue/ panicked sea/ 10 hours tossed to grief/ where vomit waters sweep the beaches gnawed by ruptured rubber masses/ huddled under searchlights/ infant wish:: democracy

pretending there is garden in the spring, paradise in time

this silk and golden weft that weaves
its vines through field and forest
this intricate design atop a kingdom
of the dying, above the restless thread
of streets, the rot beneath:: Deep
the sleep of mouse and wren, the carcasses
of crickets. The desiccated corpses
of the moths. Beneath the flowers all
dyed dismal, dog and possum disemboweled,
little deer with tongue stuck out, the rat
beheaded, like video of hostage

WHERE WE ARE NOW

Neruda wrote: You are mine; rest your dreams in my dream.
I wish that I could write that to you. I love you that much.
More. But because I do, I couldn’t. Couldn’t possibly.

We are approaching 80; the end is coming more and more into sight—
we’ve begun to feel it in our bones, our throats, even in our thoughts—
and women like you don’t rest their dreams in men’s dreams,
even in macho men’s, like the great Neruda’s. If they ever did.

You and I have had marriages that ended, spouses we watched die.
We have grandchildren, pensions, headaches, joint pains, and regrets
Books we started and will never finish, sweaters we haven’t worn for years.
Life promised so much and has given so much. If not everything.
Some of what we’ve done endures, some disintegrated to ashes, to dust.
You are my star, incandescent, lighting up the inevitable horizon.

As we complete the journey and feel the gravity of the black hole,
what can I offer you now, ask of you, try to provide?
Come in just a little closer and hold me even more tightly.
Walk alongside me, my love. Let’s lean on each other, lean together.
Wrap yourself around me and rest your warm old head on my old head.
Help me to remember. Help me to forget

COURSE CORRECTION

they told me Jesus would save me
but i have done all of the footwork
down here
on the ground
rolling my sleeves up
seeing what i have
a father who hates me
a mother who ignores me
a heart who turns the tenderness of each moment
into a tornado
i do the work
ask questions
write down thoughts
understand learned behavior
question patterns
slowly
brick by brick
i build the church of my own presence
and the altar of my own body

Plowing Water

We return to nightmare
ground, looking over the scene

of the crime, the copper
reflection of little clouds

in the torpid, tainted
canal masking disquiet

and chaos created
in us. Toiling in soft sand

underneath a burden
that would make a mule bleat,

we bitch and moan when told
to drop the rucks. Now we must

dig in, not like blind moles,
but like crippled gravediggers

in broken ground started
by high angle hell. Mangled

sandbags and serrated
pieces of metal pulled from

dirt wounds, also a hand
only missing two fingers.

Using a bayonet,
we bury rancid, fetid

flesh in a hole, puking,
not worried about a name.

Sabat (Loyalty)

Dead bodies stop looking like bodies
after a certain point.

The face, like a popped milar balloon
with all the air blown out the top,

the legs, oddly angled, their bottoms
looking for all the world

like tubes of children’s toothpaste
unevenly squeezed.

No, the dead here never arrive in an
orderly manner, like in the movies.

This is Afghanistan, so they show up
carried in blankets or what’s left

of clothes, bandages waving
like May flags.

But they all go out the same way.

The mullah works systematically,
washing and praying, singsong in his labors.

Next to him, a step back Mortaza watches
them prepare his brother for the next life.

Mohammad Gul was the pride
of Ismail Khel.

Young, handsome, brave.  Funny.
Everyone said he was funny.

You don’t hear that much in Afghanistan,
someone being funny. As they lift what’s left

into the particle board box that looks like
an Ikea desk repurposed

hands seek to guide Mortaza out.  But
he pulls away, he stays.

He watches as they wrap Gul’s head in
cotton and prop it up on

pillows of cheap foam.  They spray him with Turkish
perfume from the bazaar, and then

drape the Afghan flag and the prayer rug over his
box, taping it down with rolls of

scotch tape.  Mortaza sniffs back a tear, both for
his brother and the debt

he knows he’ll now have to pay.  He’s not scared,
just tired, and knows

that somewhere, out in Lakan,  is a man he’s never
met but will kill, as the way demands.

When we walk out, together, my boots slip,
squeaking and squishing on the sodden, dirty
tile.

Surreal Expulsion

PUT—for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Fourteen chairs loiter, emptied, no young bodies
adjusting for the next lesson, hand-raising,
class-clown antic, contemplative talk, pat show
of teen contempt, rhythm beaten with pencil, palm,
bouncing knee, jouncing heal, wise-crack, step
in the impossible problem never to be solved.
Instead, more of the same news, the same vows
taxiing the hellish hallways of feigned intention
but never taking off—the same dazed moments
of the dead. Perhaps their freed spirits now see
through the coal-black tunnel of some eternity
right into the next school’s beehive of victims.
Perhaps they still shadow their three steady mentors
who stood staunch ground in the slow-motion flow
of high-speed ammo. The clip of names shoots holes
clean through law’s callous gut—

PUT_CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCAaron, Helena, and Alex,
Carmen, Peter, Cara, Chris, and Meadow,
PUT_CCCScott, Alaina, Martin, Alyssa, and Nick,
Jamie, Luke, Gina, and “Guac” Joaquin—

PUT_CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCwhose roll call
claims only an absurd third of a minute, while
their totaled lives witnessed nearly 5 thousand
wheels of the moon through some 75 trillion miles.
But unlike the pull of that implacable moon,
the glib fever of ‘prayers and condolences’ can’t
turn the tide of memory’s radiating its fixed
fissures scored by shards of glass and bone.
Here, we’re left to settle the moonscape of Too Late
for those whose expelled footsteps befuddle us.
And lauding immortality soothes no better. We
know we relax at our children’s peril, run rash risk
of shoring up the open/closed-carry-frenzied fight,
take false hope in the bundles of white-washed bills.
Anthony Borges took five bullets to shield twenty
surviving friends, sacrificed his soccer stardom
because somehow he knew what he had to do.
His lacerated back and shattered femur scream
in a language we now must teach across America.

Walter Cronkite left footprints
in the gravel of Saigon
but he didn’t tell you their names
didn’t show you the morning commute
of an accountant in Hanoi

they televise bedsheets
replacing blown out glass
in homes of blown out people
but not the Arab Renaissance Bookshop
which opened its doors in 1966

fire hoses are used
to extinguish human spirit
courage licks the veins like flame
and the only parts of war
they can’t powerwash away
are the bloody crevices
under their own fingernails.

Strip

On my computer screen terror
Attacks and kills and shifts into
What comes after
This strip of neighborhoods or
Houses a hospital hit
Like carved out carcasses of
Dust and dead bodies bloody
And gray bloated flesh
An eyelid stuck a skull cracked
Open
The close weave of a sweater
Knit into the charred skin
Of a child of a child of a child
How this happens
Again and again and again
Arms and legs twisted back
Or out of socket
How this cannot be unraveled
Because war wears
A crown of laurels made out of
Eye lashes tiny teeth
Dead lips a corsage of
Brain matter soft and shot point
Blank or bombed this
Bombardment
Of matter
What should matter but doesn’t.

to forget or not maybe

to forget or not maybe
to fight for memory or not
i’m here i’m she
lying on my back underneath me
blue cherries of bruises ten backs
all pierced by bullets all riddled
no one seems to cry here this defenseless death is unshared with any and all
i look around at people all around still people these old trees outside what a spring so wildly
blooms and dies with a scream
i rise from my knees or maybe just
think that i rise i was a teacher
what remains of the school now
walls shrubs suckle blood from the soil
i taught them to never
kill people and now
i’m face to face
with the killers of children hands and face changed the maples turned perfectly crimson too soon
broke my
spine and soul i would tell them if i still taught never kill anyone
i rise from my knees call out to god
god i accept everything i
understand the end of life
i accept it i am desecrated
why do you punish me
with this life
after death

Grasping the Sky

Inside us: a piece of
sky, blue and rusty,
smelling of winter and
gunpowder.
Who will see us as we crawl, chasing
the shadows of the clouds?
She reanimates the land.

The bombs, and bullets, and bodies took
its breath away and send it straight into cardiac arrest.
The scars of war are on her palms and tongue,
but she keeps going because without the land,
her heart will stop, too.

Land—земля—zemlia: a greenplace, a birthgiver, our bread.
She puts her hands around it and tries to close off
the wounds of horror and destruction and
deathdeathdeathdeath
that the inhumans opened with their hungry teeth.
Sometimes, when the blood stops rushing through her ears
or between her fingers,
she hears the echo of “brotherly nations,” “local misunderstanding,”
“child actors.”
The land moans under the weight of
countless bones.

We carry no
prophecies under our skin.

The silent sky
floods our mouths.
Who will hear us climb up
the lifeless mushrooms?

He rebuilds the house.
A new foundation in place of his ancestors’
home built with tears. The missile took
the walls, but the kitchen table is still
standing in the middle.

House—будинок—budynok: a warm place, a safehold, our nest.
He drinks tea at the kitchen table.
One year anniversary,
he feels the explosions
reverberating through his ribs.
His daughter would have turned three.
His wife would have put a pot of
lilacs by her crib.
He drinks tea at the kitchen table of a murdered house.
It’s hot and bitter, and for a minute, he forgets
a new future of new houses with
no one inside.

Everything we wanted
was in the sound
of the sky without
the stench of corpses.
Who will remember us if
the task ahead will take a generation?

They reconstruct their homeland.
Too many questions, too little time: where
do they fit between now and then;
how do they embezzle millions yet fight corruption
as never before; what are dignity and justice and fairness
if the debris of a shelled hospital hide
the broken pieces of mothers and newborns.

Homeland—Батьківщина—Bat’kivschyna: a free place, a seeing glass, our hope.
They won’t live to see it without blood and tears
soaking its black ground. How do they repair machine-gunned hearts?
How do they rebuild a cracked-open sky?
They reconstruct their homeland as the bombs
try to bring them to their knees. Too many
questions, too little time. But the question,
“Will we live?” is not one of them.
Millions of hands breaking the chains
shout the answer louder than
air raid sirens.

Inside us: a whisper
of summer, when sunflowers
grow from the ash.
Who will catch the birds
pecking out a path between
the sky and wheat fields?

No one. Our wings hold the glory of freedom.

airless embrace

i miss you like i miss the sky
cold so painfully blue
angels must have
dripped blueberry juice
from the clouds
i want to tether myself
to the sky-whispers
embrace them bury my
face into their warmth
but it doesn’t make you here
i stalk the shore scooping
up birds beaks
black with blood
you used your skirt
to wipe off the
red from their feathers
why did you
let go
the earth drinks soot
i’m thirsty for
the sound of
your smile
under the winter sun
on the shore
i pick the nightingales
curl my toes to find
the damper sand
the soft homes of crabs below
i hold the memory
of your hair
between my fingers
i miss you
until i fly out of
the soil’s arms
and the sky
catches me
in its thousand
blue hands