of bodies jamming the crossroads, im

-mobile sculpture of

pure fact, dangling odd-angled & earth

-bound us.

Salaam Epigrams

War Stories

War Stories

The fitful sleep of steak and silver. We

man the monitors of dreaming, on this outpost

of fatherhood. The battlements of silence.

A friend opens a bottle of red. We’ve lived

in this dome so long it seems like freedom.

We know the crackle of distant gunfire

heightened by stereo, the plith of dust,

each stray bullet pirouetting in slo-mo.

Our fathers and brothers wear the flak jacket

of medal and shrapnel. We don the softness

of palms, the odor of diaper wipes. Somewhere

outside, someone’s brother’s buried

a box he won’t tell us where. Inside the box

is. We gird the landscape in the soundtrack

of earbuds, but inside the box is a baby

radio hissing. Inside is the rattle unjawed.

In the rings of our suburbs, outside the zone

of ground zeroes. The baby is stirring, not

crying. Inside the well of our glasses,

the smutch of discernable breathing.

III. hung lyres

“The new theory: not to praise too much…”

@

The new theory: not to praise too much, lest the child lose her inner

sense of what pleasures, the listening tuned inward.

In silence before sleep, looking up to her ceiling, four years in her

mind, she says: someone is telling the story of our life.

I see her great-grandmother in her brown eyes, in her roil of curls.

I don’t know who it is.

In the woods of her wander, she.

They will be telling it our whole life.

“When the bombs fell, she could barely raise…”

@

When the bombs fell, she could barely raise

her pendulous head, wept shrapnel

until her mother capped the fire

with her breast. She teetered

on the highwire of herself. She

lay down & the armies retreated, never

showing their backs. When she unlatched

from the breast, the planes took off again.

Stubborn stars refused to fall…

“you mute you without openings…”

@

you mute you without openings

enwombed you greedy to eat the fruit of light

to swallow elixirs of sound

marooned you in that watery egg that mother

voice a constant hum above

this is the air you could & ample be

everyone waking to sirens

the arc & com

motion of glass released from its bottle

this is aria of nightfall that sets the anvil

to tremble the temple behind the temples

when you emerged not mouth or fingers but cries

& whorls & folds to hold sound in

the first thing I saw was your ear

“Is the ear…”

“in the cell of else…”

@

In the cell of else / in the pitch-white

someone’s hands shackled between ankles

in the nights & sunny days keeping the clouds

shaking the rib cage & no way

to keep the music from entering & breaking

the bodies hit / Let the bodies hit the / Barney

is a dinosaur / this is the touching without being

touched / this is the being without