as they potshot its plates, strafe the sides with BBs—

Why aren’t all things built to repel us?

Across the cardboard, the skull shell seems

to stick out a paw; pauses, withdraws:

its split flanks creeping back to the shadows.

Devotional

DEVOTIONAL

We’ve lost my uncle’s letters from the war.

Conflict slipped if not erased from memory,

while I invent his remnants: some spore

of thought, some sheaf of papers buried

in a desk, real as these photos’ ridged,

turf-pillowed half faces I watch get stacked,

ordered on a wall. They are not mine

to grieve, these lives that flared into nothing,

then too much: blunted like crumbling

incisors, cream chits that gleam with gold foil

overlays: nub winkings in loosened soils

someone’s worked free and washed

of grit, parsed into a pattern that doubles

as code: consonantal messages on a bed of moss.

Devotional

DEVOTIONAL

Once I caught a glimpse of him in sleep:

my cousin napping on the couch, chest spattered

with scarlets thrown down from my mother’s

stained-glass windows. He lay as if beached,

tremors of shadow running his length as sun

passed behind glass so that I couldn’t tell

whether he or light breathed: the legs root pale,

belly a shatter of red, blue striations

veining his clavicle. A shirt, stuffed

over the face, cut off his head. Each bit

of him I watched—the rawboned shoulder, puffed

knuckles—seemed to sink under color’s scrim.

What was it that I saw? Drowned sailor, or mythic

merman? The light, or coming dark in him?

C2: Male, 42 Years Old

C2: MALE, 42 YEARS OLD

Why pretend my trepanation hole’s

a bullet wound, nose bridge crushed by a rifle

butt? At war between your needs to uncover

and interpret, you make me emissary from a past

I had no part of, evidence for unimaginable

conflicts. Dead, I’m too public. The relic

your memory needs but cannot find: my time

underground an equal estrangement to

your family’s wars. But if each of us slides behind

a mask that cannot fit, nothing comes

alive through the mix: we do not grow closer

but more anonymous—

Look. Even my weight

in hand bewilders you. I’m the architecture

for an elegy you can only guess at.

Portrait of E20: Female, 32 Years Old

PORTRAIT OF E20: FEMALE, 32 YEARS OLD

This shot swims into sight like the sonogram

a friend has sent, her first child flickering

in the blizzard of her womb, as the cranium

on the table’s grained with swirls from rotting

coffin wood. Like fronds of kelp shuddering

in a shale tide pool, I’d thought, but can’t recall

which image sparked the phrase: child, skull: each

is an unbreachable world, as is my uncle

whose silences about his past now reach

for a history in which he’s rendered

unassailable. The skull’s stains curl

like a newborn’s whorl of hair across a fontanel.