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.

 

 

 

RECKONING

don’t worry about me
i am not well but you’ve worried enough
my prosperity has a body

count—

this shielded flesh
conspicuous & allowed to be
balks at being back-

ground—

this mouth taught (without being taught)
it is clearest & loudest & purest
squirms when it must shut up & become

ears—

i do not know how to be ears
i know how to open my mouth monstrously
wide to spew & eat

words—

words are my birthright & we the
authors bulldoze other stories to rubble
so the Other trips over each foregone

conclusion—

i am trained to make murder invisible
but understories cling, bloody mine
with the dragged, sullied

bodies—

of those disappeared beneath my
own soft landing
we need other & better

stories—

speak please, whatever you have to say—
pull out this blighted story by the roots
& plant a new one, green, tender, & worth

loving—

 

THE SMALL I

this is my country

look
i overturn the junk
drawer of my
white/middle-class
life and take stock
rifling
i find i am not a capital letter anymore
first person singular has shrunk
wizened down
to that apple core i found beneath the car seat
last month
or that ivy there, brown and dead
because i killed it
the waxy leaf tree outside
the front door
(the city said we were its stewards
in a single-page note
in our mail-
box) my heart
brimming then
with the largesse of new motherhood
i thought i could
take on the health
of every tree
in California but
over the course of six
years the ivy became a cloak around
its trunk
then an embrace
then a stranglehold
until tree leaves thinned
i spent a long time
tearing up the roots
of that ivy
now it browns—
saved the tree but
ivy clings
a flammable bolus
around its midsection

and the small i—
how to locate i
when i
am both tree
and ivy?