our beagle would sign his line of piss, which said: it’s good

to be alive and eating meat. He was adding to the map

our eyes can’t see, nor throats can speak. Our shield and our help

at Great Lakes Naval Base, my father imagined permutations

of disaster. We were Region Five. Coordinates run,

scenarios conceived, New Madrid fault lines, the possible

flood of Des Plaines, a tornado’s blinding spiral

rolling its dozer across the plain. No preparing for it,

just to pick up what remained. If a nuclear bomb hit

Chicago, the epicenter here, he’d draw concentric circles

radiating, a pebble disturbing the mirror of a lake. Each circle

meant a slower death. Between us and them, the Wall

was a mirror reflecting us and nothing beyond. The whole

world was what the mirror hung upon. He showed me how

to hold a blade, how to watch my reflection for every nick, how

to cut my face without bleeding. I bled. I hooked my glasses

over teenaged ears. Outside, the blur of lawn became grass,

each blade stabbing upward to light. I thought I knew

we see as through a glass, darkly.… My frames have narrowed

to lenses eye-sized. My myopia grows. To see

what’s happening, I open a laptop, lean into the screen:

Black Site (Exhibit I)

Love Potion #42

Love Potion #42

Before you, I slept on a bayonet.

Bided my time in clothing. Neither experience

nor innocence kept me

from bleeding. Before you, I held

an invisible sign: please touch this abyss.

How pleasing to have you sieve me

through your lungs, leave me essential

dregs and seeds. Since there’s no place

a grain of sand cannot hide, deserts

and strands now travel the world

with us, in shoes. Let me kind you in two

tongues. Habibti, two decades ago,

we fell off a cliff, each holding a wing,

each holding a hand, and have yet to land.

Saddam’s Fingerprints

Etruscan Cista Handle

Etruscan Cista Handle

How peaceful he looks, the gates of his face

now shut for good, facing the ground. His body’s

hoisted horizontal, his arms embrace

the air, his penis a slack finger of gravity.

Two winged soldier-angels must stoop, stagger

to cradle his naked inhuman weight.

Their heads torqued, as if listening to the lead

of the body, they bear it in bent tender shoulders,

in the balked leaning and strain of their gait,

and struggle against falling. Their maker is dead.

And still the war continues, though it takes

other names. Sarpedon bronzed not breathing, the angels

bronze stumbling, all burned into a single handle.

To open the jewelry box, you have to grasp the corpse.

Black Site (Exhibit M)

A Toast (for Nawal Nasrallah)

A Toast (for Nawal Nasrallah)

Chair legs screech across the banquet floor

above us, a wedding feast

of people pulling themselves closer, closer

to the constellation of tables

while here underground, alone with our ears,