wing where my cousin worked. Before that?

Showers of sparks launched through a green night:

desert volleys from the nuclear submarine

this same cousin commands. Now I stand

by a stranger’s cranium missing

its braincase: clods of crumpled foils unearthed,

scorched papers, the thin nugget of a filling—

My eye twitches, blurs. Before I know it,

tears startle my fingers.

Portrait of F11: Female, 39 Years Old

PORTRAIT OF F11: FEMALE, 39 YEARS OLD

for Lynndie England

Unhooded for its shot—a burlap sack—

this skull seems more denuded, its oval ear

canal so delicate, I long to stick

a finger there, to wiggle, poke, and hear

the lambdoid suture crack. Would this cheekbone,

if I struck it, smash? I finger grooves

where vessels plumped the skin. What fun

to imagine how my thumbs might soothe

or stop blood’s flow. What sparks of pain, what groans

I’d make, the fragile joins rubbed, crushed

till a cry’s released: a name, a date, a reason—

To my right, a woman lowers her head to meet it;

smiles for her phone as she snaps a pic, then shrugs:

her white fist jutting a bald thumbs-up.

F20: Male, 29 Years Old

F20: MALE, 29 YEARS OLD

Only we, the mandible and maxilla, are left:

windup jaws dismantled for the joke. Stained

with tobacco and calculus, we’re the fragile rest

of him that feels most human. Our size suggests his brain

was malformed, body stunted: we were his best

defense, gnashing at the hands that cuffed him,

tearing through cloth ties or plastic, leather, skin—

Fact is, you want him armed, each tooth polished

as a bullet, the hope we clamped ourselves tight

to strangers’ fingers, refusing to be diminished.

That, despised, a figure of indifference,

he still had means to defend himself, some right

to wound that defined his humanness: a violence

he never lost, no matter what else he’d missed.

Portrait of D19: Male, 41 Years Old

PORTRAIT OF D19: MALE, 41 YEARS OLD

This skull recalls for me The Dying Gaul,

that statue’s cast I found secreted

in a museum stairwell, dust-veil caul

darkening the groin’s slivered wound-lips.

A child, I traced that snail shape curled in its nest

of hair, wondering why a man would go to war

naked, and how his sweat-slicked flesh

might feel, slipping against another soldier’s.

Easy to taste. Easy to tear. I stroked the deepest

breast folds, skin crust chipped at one thigh,

exposing a grubby notch of porcelain:

timeworn flaw for which he’d been consigned

to the shadows. The same material weakness to stone

and skin which makes me now remember him.

Portrait of D17: Female, 37 Years Old

PORTRAIT OF D17: FEMALE, 37 YEARS OLD

In Phnom Penh’s museum, the skulls are stacked

in aquarium tanks: grim toys for hooks to ply

free from the rubble. Here, each one gets a tag,

a mount, a photograph to suggest a life,

perhaps a name, might be envisioned. Yet I’m