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Sand Opera

Philip Metres
Chapters (73)
  1. Cover
  2. Note to the Reader
  3. Illumination of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew
  4. I. abu ghraib arias
  5. The Blues of Lane McCotter
  6. (echo /ex/): “In the name of God…”
  7. Searching the Koran (Standard Operating Procedure)
  8. (echo /ex/): “In the beginning…”
  9. The Blues of Javal Davis
  10. (echo /ex/): “next day…”
  11. Public Address/Ghost Soldiers
  12. (echo /ex/): “his name is G…”
  13. The Blues of Charles Graner
  14. (echo /ex/): “On the third day…”
  15. Handling the Koran (Standard Operating Procedure)
  16. (echo /ex/): “First the man…”
  17. Document Exploitation (Standard Operating Procedure)
  18. (echo /ex/): “Now these are the generations…”
  19. The Blues of Lynddie England
  20. (echo /ex/): “me…”
  21. The Blues of Ken Davis
  22. (echo /ex/): “Now I am what I saw…”
  23. MUSLIM BURIAL (Standard Operating Procedure)
  24. (echo /ex/): “And it came to pass…”
  25. The Blues of Joe Darby
  26. (echo /ex/)
  27. II. first recitative
  28. Woman Mourning Son
  29. Recipe from the Abbasid
  30. Home Sweet Home
  31. The Iraqi Curator’s PowerPoint
  32. Black Site (Exhibit Q)
  33. Asymmetries
  34. Salaam Epigrams
  35. War Stories
  36. III. hung lyres
  37. “The new theory: not to praise too much…”
  38. “When the bombs fell, she could barely raise…”
  39. “you mute you without openings…”
  40. “Is the ear…”
  41. “in the cell of else…”
  42. “this is the air we script to lips…”
  43. “I had no names to blazon their tender…”
  44. “She asks, is that man crying…”
  45. “What does it mean, I say.”
  46. IV. second recitative
  47. Breathing Together
  48. Testimony (after Daniel Heyman)
  49. When I Was a Child, I Lived as a Child, I Said to My Dad
  50. Black Site (Exhibit I)
  51. Love Potion #42
  52. Saddam’s Fingerprints
  53. Etruscan Cista Handle
  54. Black Site (Exhibit M)
  55. A Toast (for Nawal Nasrallah)
  56. Cell/(ph)one (A simultaneity in four voices)
  57. V. homefront/removes
  58. “I hear it, at times, even in the wind.”
  59. “was taken was rapidly…”
  60. “What consequence is a body.”
  61. “tried hanging myself…”
  62. “I was planning my lesson on imagery…”
  63. “taken to outside court…”
  64. “In the wake of.”
  65. “I suspended upside…”
  66. “You look at me / looking at you.”
  67. “so I could pass the time… ”
  68. “As if, somehow, I were responsible.”
  69. <hover to see video>
  70. “On the flight overseas…”
  71. “I did not know my…”
  72. Compline
  73. Notes

Cover

[image: cover]

Note to the Reader

NOTE TO THE READER

Alice James Books encourages you to calibrate your e-reader device settings using the line of characters below as a guide, which optimizes the line length and character size:

in / this is the air / there is no other / we unseal & key / the same air /

Please take the time to adjust the size of the text on your viewer so the line of characters above appears on one line, if possible. Doing this will most accurately reproduce the layout of the text intended by the author. Viewing the title at a higher than optimal text size or on a device too small to accomodate the lines in the text will cause the reading experience to be altered considerably; single lines of some poems may be displayed as multiple lines of text. If this occurs, the line break will be marked with a shallow indent.

ALSO BY PHILIP METRES

Poetry:

A Concordance of Leaves (chapbook)

abu ghraib arias (chapbook)

Ode to Oil (chapbook)

To See the Earth

Instants (chapbook)

Primer for Non-Native Speakers (chapbook)

Translation:

I Burned at the Feast: Selected Poems of Arseny Tarkovsky

Compleat Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Poetic Texts of Lev Rubinstein

Catalogue of Comedic Novelties: Selected Poems of Lev Rubinstein

A Kindred Orphanhood: Selected Poems of Sergey Gandlevsky

Criticism:

Come Together: Imagine Peace

Behind the Lines: War Resistance Poetry on the American Homefront Since 1941

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Grateful acknowledgment for publishing versions of these poems is due to Banipal (UK), Diode, FIELD, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review Online, The Massachusetts Review, Matter, Mizna, Narrative, New Letters, New Orleans Review, Ostrich Review, POEM: International English Language Quaterly (UK), Poetry, Seneca Review, Publication of the Modern Language Association (PMLA), and World Literature Today (WLT). Thanks as well to the anthologies Come Together: Imagine Peace (Bottom Dog Press, 2008), Eating the Pure Light: Homage to Thomas McGrath (The Backwaters Press, 2009), The New American Poetry of Engagement: A 21st Century Anthology (McFarland & Company, 2012), Obsession: An Anthology of Sestinas (Dartmouth, 2014), and With Our Eyes Wide Open: Poems of the New American Century (West End Press, 2014) for reprinting a number of these poems.

Selections prose sections from “Homefront/Removes” were published as “Home/Front,” which won the Anne Halley Prize for best poem by Massachusetts Review (2011). One of the sections appeared as a broadside.

Thanks to Sommer Browning and Tony Mancus at Flying Guillotine Press for publishing abu ghraib arias as a chapbook (2011), which won the Arab American Book Award for poetry in 2012. The first version of the chapbook featured a cover made from recycled army uniforms, thanks to Chris Arendt and the Combat Paper Project.