more moved by what’s anonymous, past; imagine

fields of faces sunken with decay, eyes

jellied in their sockets, heel meats bruised,

bloated in the rain—

Perhaps the skulls prefer

a lack of names as, scrubbed of self and skin,

they’re trauma’s best witnesses: fused

by time and pain to one crisis, never

to be separated. Lost as men, they become event.

In this, they achieve a terrible transcendence.

C18: Male, 36 Years Old

C18: MALE, 36 YEARS OLD

Elegant as an instep, my profile’s arch

sails above this smashed eye orbit, my crown

a thin moon shaving, diadem of bone: arc

under which the starless universe nestles. Eons

ago, it seems, doctors jabbered at me, prodded.

They measured my genitals and cranium, graded

my skin tone, shocked me with paddles—

Now deracinated, unfleshed, steeped in an essential

nothingness, I’m a perfect spark of blank

you still can’t stand to witness, dwindled

to sex, age, quadrants as if these were my frank

embodiments: details to be controlled

or touched, wounds without which you fear

I’ve grown exceptional.

Devotional

DEVOTIONAL

New York, April 2002

At the towers’ excavated site, I follow

a student to its fenced wreckage: photos

of the missing, like stations of the cross,

backdrop to his repeated tale: the ashen crowds

he pushed among, screams of metal, a mounted cop

he watched lunge from the engulfing cloud—

Reciting his testimony to any tourist

who will listen, to inscribe himself on that silent

scaffolding—its sheared irons, erasure of rivets—

where some part of my cousin, too, resides;

his image absorbed into this makeshift shrine,

ghosting its photos. While I try and revive

a life from the rift: its bursts of steam that billow

and shroud, churning my voice to stuttered syllables.

Devotional

DEVOTIONAL

What had my uncle seen in the VC’s faces?

Black hair, black eyes, his high Chinese cheekbones

mirrored inside thinner cheeks: noses less

wide, yet still recognizable as his own.

Only his skin encased the claim “American.”

Chinaman, the man behind me seethed

at my cousin’s naval academy graduation—

Did my uncle search the enemy body

for some dying light of recognition,

or did he identify his nation through their eyes,

its rage for isolation brutal, clarified?

As now my cousin turns at the stranger’s shout

to search the crowd, our camera’s sodium light

of pride burning briefly in him. Going out—

Portrait of E4: Male, 34 Years Old

PORTRAIT OF E4: MALE, 34 YEARS OLD

Shards of a shattered hoplite helmet? Taped

platings of a Brodie? Squint, and the armadillo’s

self-protective hunch appears, its stippled

skin thrice banded, flexible, the olive shell

carved like a teardrop so that its wedge head, rolled,

seals the ball. There are no chinks in its armor.

Outfitted for a fight it wouldn’t start, it’s victim

to its own design. I’ve seen boys clamor

and fishtail to hit one, emboldened by its shyness