for women, who sat huddled together

in the darkness of the front room, sobbing.

Through night vision goggles they appeared

glaucous green, luminous and unnatural.

One of them – with cat’s eyes of light – saw me.

The men of military age were bound, silenced

in another room. I numbered them with a Sharpie

penned on the white tape of their blindfolds.

Of the many depositions I wrote,

the many sentences I framed in careful precision,

how many were translated into Arabic?

Farid, Hasan, Mohammed, Abdullah, Jafar.

How many have heard my words spoken in court?

The Accuser. The Professor. Sgt Turner.

Late at night, Jackowski and I taped the flex charge

to the house gate. I unspooled the shock tube, removed

the safety. Hathaway radioed the countdown – and at zero –

I pulled the pin. It was me, Sgt Turner,

who cracked the night open with explosives

and wrote it all down, word by word.

It’s been four years. In Poland, on the Baltic coast,

I rent a flat from Darick and Goshe. Fish and black coffee

for breakfast. Read Seife’s Zero: The Biography

of a Dangerous Idea. And when I climb to the peak

of the coastal dunes in the Slowinski National Park,

I find nothing but wind, sand, the blue sea driven inward.

Jundee Ameriki

Many the healers of the body.

Where the healers of the soul?

AHMAD SHAUQI

At the VA hospital in Long Beach, California,

Dr Sushruta scores open a thin layer of skin

to reveal an object traveling up through muscle.

It is a kind of weeping the body does, expelling

foreign material, sometimes years after injury.

Dr Sushruta lifts slivers of shrapnel, bits

of coarse gravel, road debris, diamond

points of glass – the minutiae of the story

reconstructing a cold afternoon in Baghdad,

November of 2005. The body offers aged cloth

from an abaya dyed in blood, shards of bone.

And if he were to listen intently, he might hear

the roughened larynx of this woman calling up

through the long corridors of flesh, saying

Allah al Akbar, before releasing

her body’s weapon, her dark and lasting gift

for this jundee Ameriki, who carries fragments

of the war inscribed in scar tissue,

a deep, intractable pain, the dull grief of it

the body must learn to absorb.

American Internal

Down in the hole, down in the clay and mud,

we dig. The noon sun hot on our backs

as we bend to the task, as if digging

down into our own shadows

with the stained shovels of our hands,

digging until someone gasps – another,

they have discovered another; with pale eyes,

the dead faces rooted with worms and stone,

brassy shells of bullets in their mouths,

hands reaching for what no one can see above,

as if desperate to embrace us. We raise each

carefully from the earth, the bodies of men

dressed in sandals and thawbs,

wet robes of cotton dyed by clay,