A Speech Before the Splattered Blood

The DOW spikes up, banking on
a dwarfish draft of Armageddon gloom.
Our president will speak at five.
No casualty is casual.
It’s hard to match a suit and tie
to splatter of the coming blood.
Ahmed, a driver in Iraq, says:
“This is a miserable life.
We spent it shopping for war
or hiding from bombs.”
He recites his summary
as if his time is finished as a boiled egg.
All eyes red from pressing
night’s extended weight.

Justice spelled so many ways our alphabets
no longer know their proper forms.
Iraqis seal their windows shut as if a roll
of tape will come between the fragile glass
and force of missiles jetting
through the tainted sky.
Stirring the hostile soup.
It seems the only spoon we own,
yet who can watch the broth of freedom
dwindle to a water drop.
Have you ever sat on a fence,
answerless and trembling,
wishing posts were firm mirage?

I swing like heavy pendulums
between the prayer to end this horror
and nightmares of approaching graves.
The writer with no salving words,
no sonnets in a pocketbook.
No talons on the olive branch,
no wings of doves, no angels near
as embassies evacuate, as guns replace
the meetings of our shattered hearts
now beetles under heavy boots.
Philanthropy or wet revenge —
I can’t decide and so I kneel
as quicksand travels to my chin.

*First Published in Ariga

photographing the civil war

not shadow but
reflection

february rain from
tanguy’s sky until the streets
are all dull grey mirrors

if i keep my distance
i could be anyone

if i get in my car and drive
i could call it escape

could call it running away
which is sometimes an act of
cowardice and sometimes
an act of survival

and i sit in this room of
empty chairs instead
with my thoughts
and my bitter resentments

i believe in gorky at the age of 43

in rothko at the age of 66
but not in my father

not at any age and not in any
of the bars i spent my childhood in

i remember the threats
and all of the dire predictions

i remember fifteen years
spent perfecting the
art of silence

what a sad fucking
victory it’s become

poem burdened with the weight of democracy

this act of not killing

this place where
nothing is forgiven

where nails are driven through
human flesh
then pulled back out

where your god sings
a beautiful song without
meaning

think about words as
nothing more than noise

look at the men you’ve
elected to power

consider how they
would eat their own shit to
never have to give it up

how they believe in rape
and in the
necessity of poverty

the inevitability of war

the logic of children
butchered for the sake of a
better future

ritual

or the names of the children
found starving in the basement
or the name of
the person who finds them

the blood of
whoever left them there

all the pictures of hell
it could be used to paint

Suddenly It’s Solitaire

One moment he’s pruning a wayward branch;
garden tools rest happily against
the brick like spoons in soup.
You wonder how it stayed this warm.
An ancient sun is baking leaves, raisins
in a rising dough of seasons on a schedule.
He edges grass the way he’s always
sculpted love — by doing things
in steady gestures like the rain.
A seizure, then a surgery.
Then solitaire so suddenly.
Feet aren’t there to track rich soil;
welcome mats have lost all words.

I bake two pies and take
two pieces down the street.
It’s a short walk and a long hill
up to the crown of thorns.
The first thick snow is blowing
blizzards of his death as if
some crazy heaven dropped a sack of flour
and all the meals I’m handing you
are just reminders of the cold.
I ring the bell, its tired fly
catches in the vivid freeze.

A single placemat at the bar
stares back at us as if
no cards but this exist.
Boots are empty lecture notes
reminding me that luck
is amputated by the hour.
His coat is hanging like a ghost
beside a hat that buckles
in our winded sighs.
A living room of Roman girth —
spotless but for photographs
you finger in the night’s abyss.

*First Published in Black Creek Review

Inside a Name

I whisper her name aloud —
you tug at a chair to gather your coat,
pet the dog and say goodbye
before a question
kicks you in the tender groin.
Your eyelids curtsy once and clench —
a mirror of the coffin’s hinge.
I’d like to follow roads you take,
through briars of the fruitless vines,
down sharp, dry cliffs
that crumble at the slightest wind.
Our silence is my orphanage,
but you don’t know the windows
you have blocked from light.

Hand me just a sweater’s sleeve,
some syntax, context, anything
that spells the way she made the bed
into a novel packed with lust
and happiness now cherry pits.
Her memory is snow in summer,
smelly oil on concrete floors
of some garage I sense is cold.
Nearly fifty years have passed.
Sores should own a scar or two,
but closure is impossible
without exposure to the air.

I’d like to follow roads you take,
even if this island has no sustenance
and storms direct the weather vanes.
Death might have been a melody
we rode until the song came back.
I step on leaves around her grave,
hear the crunch of missing heels,
stay the hungry hummingbird,
who cannot find the center
of a rose removed —
wings on fire for searching
through the muted spring.

*First Published in Epiphany

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