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

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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.

Thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts, the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture (Creative Workforce Fellowship), Cuyahoga Arts & Culture, the Ohio Arts Council, and John Carroll University for grants in support of the writing of this work. The Creative Workforce Fellowship is a program of the Community Partnership for Arts and Culture. The Fellowship program is supported by the residents of Cuyahoga County through a public grant from Cuyahoga Arts & Culture.

Thanks to Rebecca Black, Hayan Charara, Sarah Gridley, Anna Meek, and Mary Weems for their extensive remarks on the manuscript. Thanks as well to Kazim Ali, Danny Caine, Michael Croley, Ian Demsky, Michael Dumanis, Fady Joudah, Marilyn Hacker, Chris Kempf, Dave Lucas, E.J. McAdams, Mark Nowak, Radius of Arab American Writers, Inc. (RAWI), and Maria Smith and the Cleveland Nonviolence Network for your encouragement. For opening spaces.

Thanks as well to Justin Petropoulos for creating renditions of Bashmilah’s hand drawings of black sites.

Thanks to everyone at Alice James Books—especially Carey Salerno, Stephen Motika, Alyssa Neptune, Mary Austin Speaker, Julia Bouwsma, and Meg Willing—for making this happen.

And most importantly, thank you to Amy Breau, to whom this work is dedicated, for her constant companionship, her careful reading, her nurturing of our children Adele and Leila, and her invitation to a greater opening.

…it took the war to teach it, that you were responsible for everything you saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that a lot never made it in at all, it just stayed there in your eyes.

—MICHAEL HERR, Dispatches

If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be?

—1 Corinthians 12:17

Illumination of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew

Illumination of the Martyrdom of St. Bartholomew

from the dried hide of calves

carved & sewn in quires

they bend & tend to him / as if

tailors or healers & not rending

skin from limb / their eyes

narrowing knives / he balances

naked on ankle / a single

arm aloft as if in flight

from body’s scything / O wholly

gold-haloed & yet-membered head

soothe the eye in which I am

thrown / hand without shield /

scissored out hymn / & if

the body’s flayed & displayed

in human palms / & human skin

scrolled open / the body still dances

& if the flesh is the text

of God / bid a voice to rise /

& rise again

I. abu ghraib arias

The Blues of Lane McCotter

(echo /ex/): “In the name of God…”

Searching the Koran (Standard Operating Procedure)

(echo /ex/): “In the beginning…”

The Blues of Javal Davis

(echo /ex/): “next day…”

Public Address/Ghost Soldiers

(echo /ex/): “his name is G…”

The Blues of Charles Graner

The Blues of Charles Graner

the Christian in me

knows it’s wrong

but the corrections

officer in me can’t

help but love

making a grown man

piss himself

(echo /ex/): “On the third day…”

Handling the Koran (Standard Operating Procedure)

(echo /ex/): “First the man…”

Document Exploitation (Standard Operating Procedure)

(echo /ex/): “Now these are the generations…”

The Blues of Lynddie England

The Blues of Lynddie England

[G] played me

I guess I was blind

by love

maybe it was

[                            ]

for documentation

maybe it was

for his own

amusement

[                            ]

I don’t know

what was going through

his head

but he took it

[                            ]

it shows

he has power

over me

anything he asked

[                            ]

he knew

I would do

(echo /ex/): “me…”

The Blues of Ken Davis

(echo /ex/): “Now I am what I saw…”

MUSLIM BURIAL (Standard Operating Procedure)

(echo /ex/): “And it came to pass…”

The Blues of Joe Darby

The Blues of Joe Darby

I laughed at first I did

not know what I was looking at

a bunch of bodies bending over

a pyramid of tumbling

They call me bulls-eye they call me traitor

the pictures were taken

the pictures I gave them

now they are everywhere and I

can’t go home again

They call me walking dead call me waking night

I dream they stand on naked

boxes again they back on each other’s

backs again they bloody mouth from flinch

of dogs they hands on sandbagged heads

call me talking dead call me waking eye

I gun to sleep again I closet night

no sleep but I would give them up again

I close exposed I wake and listen

I would give them up again

(echo /ex/)

II. first recitative

Woman Mourning Son

Woman Mourning Son

—Najaf

I pull up the blinds, they screech in retreat,

mad grackles beaking for space on the lawn.

I flip open the news and she flutters out,

trailing the blot of her shadow. I yawn,

her mouth yawns and yawns. Like wings, her chador

unfurls over a bare, bleached street. She looks

almost like she’s flying, one leg cut off

by the photo. The shape of her shadow’s

an F-16, the flat plane of her hand

the jet nose, the other hand a missile

tucked so gently beneath the wing. And now

the blot of that shadow’s a flailing bat,

a ragged flag—this black-clad woman’s hands

open and skyward, as if she wants to vault

the blot of this shadow. From above, it looks

just like whirling, a waltz with no one

but chadors and shadows. Now she’s lost

her face in the ink. The road is a white

sheet. Somewhere someone’s hands danced

over a keyboard to deliver the ordnance.

Recipe from the Abbasid

Recipe from the Abbasid

Skin & clean a fat, young sheep & open it

like a door, a port city hosting overseas guests

& remove its stomach. In its interior, place

surveyors in exploratory khaki, a stuffed goose

& in the goose’s belly, a stuffed hen, & in the hen,

machine gun nests, C rations, grenades, a stuffed

pigeon, & in the pigeon’s belly, a stuffed thrush,

& in the thrush’s belly, contractual negotiations

& subtle threats, all sprinkled with sauce. Sew the slit

into a smile, dispatch handshakes. Add Chevron,

Exxon, Texaco, Shell. Place the sheep in the oven

& leave until this black slimy stuff, excretion

of the earth’s body, is crispy on the outside,

& ready for presentation.

Home Sweet Home

The Iraqi Curator’s PowerPoint

The Iraqi Curator’s PowerPoint

You can see the footprints around the hole

The Iraqi Curator said. They smashed the head

Because they could not lift it from its base,

This statue of Nike. It’s still missing.

And this is Umma Al-Ghareb, my dig site.

The Mother of Scorpions, it means. Y’anni,

Next slide: more damage by looters. If the eyes

Are gems, they will be made into holes.

If the skin is gold, goodbye. Now this is a sight:

The bodies too heavy, so they took the heads

Of these terracotta lions. A slide is missing

Here. What I ask you is this: base

What you believe on what you can almost see.

For example: you hear the dogs bay

From the outskirts of the city. They head

Wherever they smell flesh. My eyes

Still see buildings that now are holes.

What you see is not what is missing.

Next slide. I’d heard that Etana, missing

For years, was in Damascus. Then in Beirut.

Then, I got a call from an art friend, a whole

Continent away. Does it have a scratch at the base

Of his hand and along his chest I said he said yes

Of course I said and it is headless

And writing on the shoulder beneath no head

And he said yes and yes the right arm missing

And I said my God I said John take my eyes

And let me see. I was blind and now had sight

Though I could not see it. This is the basis

Of art, sadiki. There’s something beyond the hole

Which each must face. Missile sites. Army bases.

The hole in the ground where thousands climbed

Into sky. Missing heads of state. Eyes.

Black Site (Exhibit Q)

Asymmetries

Asymmetries

Longing to grasp the familiar, names

against the anonymous

appendages & naked flesh, a nipple the eye

could nuzzle, to hide in

dark islands of hair, I near the photo—

as if the body erotic

could shield against the camera’s scalpel.

In its distance, the bodies

without faces line a riverbank, shade

into some darker shadow,

obeying the desire of gravity. I’m thinking

of Iraq, how they lay out

each disinterred nest of femurs & ribs

on separate sackcloths,

trying to punctuate the run-on sentence.

After making love, once,

you said every face, split in half, fit

so precariously, so comically,

we spent the next half hour shading one side

of our faces in the mirror,

then the other. This world is centaur: half

daydream, half nightmare,

not knowing if we’re awake or dreaming.

Wandering the gallery, we drift

onto an imagined balcony

& gape at the traffic

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

silence / from our imagination / in wave upon

wave / in a shipping container & I love you

in a box of shock you love me / in a cemented

dream / we’re a happy family /

with a great big hug and chains that leave no mark

Won’t you say you love me too?

“this is the air we script to lips…”

@

this is the air we script to lips / air we usher in lungs / that ushers us

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

hair of the fathers / shoulder of the mothers / air of laughter & air

of slaughter / air / of wrecks & reliquaries / of wasp & papyrus

barbed wire & hung / lyres & this is the air we draw in / air we expel

sphere that spires in us / spears us into us / stories we find ourselves

in / the middle of something / a building we did not build

& this is the air of ozone & benzene / that quickens the blood /

clarifies the eye / this is the air / there is no other / nesting in us /

then beaked & breaking / a sudden flutter / ring / out of us /

this is the air we gather / there is no other / lower / nature / field

this the clearing / this the threshing / floor the flesh’s door / unseen

seething song that fills the nautilus that the little hammer wields

to drum / aria of the air sculpting the thinking bone

“I had no names to blazon their tender…”

@

I had no names to blazon their tender

curves, their riverine curves

so took the ones we inherit: auricle

to name the human bloom—

what does it mean, amputee?

lobed trumpet that listens to the oracle

of cymballed world: canal & drum

vestibule to the oceanic home

where windows are elliptical & circular

is there such a thing as “orphan”?

& we host a motion labyrinth, a squid.

Maleus, incus, stapes. Cover your ears

dear child, your cartilage is not yet hard—

it’s too soon to know to hear is to bend.

Your silk purses will sow the wind.

Your flexible shells haul their own ocean.

“She asks, is that man crying…”

@

She asks: is that man crying

or singing? How should I answer?

War takes him in its fingers,

raises his body, a punctured bone

flute, to its lips, and breathes

the living dust

to dust alone—

this is the air we scull

air of ancestors & ashpits

just five, the child’s baptized into this

unhappiness:

she corrects the voices

she hears butcher

the name of the country she’s never

seen—it’s “ear-rock,”

not “eye-rack.”

“What does it mean, I say.”

@

What does it mean, I say. She says, it means

to be quiet, just by yourself. She says, there’s

a treasure chest inside. You get to dig it out.

Somehow, it’s spring. Says, will it always

rain? In some countries, I say, they are

praying for rain. She asks, why do birds sing?

In the dream, my notebook dipped in water,

all the writing lost. Says, read the story again.

But which one? That which diverts the mind

is poetry. Says, you know those planes

that hit those buildings? Asks, why do birds sing?

When the storm ends, she stops, holds her hands

together, closes her eyes. What are you doing?

I’m praying for the dead worms. Says, listen:

IV. second recitative

Breathing Together

Breathing Together

Bear with me. I want to explain why it took so long, the strange and hard ways this mss. hit me. Weeks ago, a close friend who worked for the State Department killed himself, apparently leaping from the Taft Bridge. It was shocking, but also unbelievable—truly, we did not believe it at first. P— was in no way suicidal. He and I had had a conversation where he scoffed at those who ended their lives. He’d seen a lot of godawful things, had interviewed hundreds of Holocaust survivors, and felt it was his duty to bear witness. No obit was released for a long time, the family wasn’t talking, and no police reports of a suicide on that day. I tracked down that the news came through a woman who had been staying with P—. It sounds like a conspiracy movie, but on the day of his death, two federal officers came to the apartment at 6 am and interviewed him privately for an hour. She was asked to leave. When she returned, the officers confiscated P—’s home computer. They made plans for dinner, and he left for work—the last anyone saw him. P— had been interviewing people in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers and detainees. He was a research phenom, intensely moral—self-righteously so. Perhaps he stumbled onto information he shouldn’t have and was considering releasing it….We’re all being cautious about how we talk about this. You don’t have to say anything back about it, but I wanted you to know a little of the story.

Testimony (after Daniel Heyman)

When I Was a Child, I Lived as a Child, I Said to My Dad

When I Was a Child, I Lived as a Child, I Said to My Dad

Saint Paul was a jackass, my father muttered,

keystroking his tank into position in The Mother

of All Tank Battles. I turned back to the screen,

maneuvering pixilated tanks. Each arrow key

altered trajectory, each cursor tap a tank blast. Fast-

forward two decades: in a cubicle outside Vegas,

Jonah joysticks his Predator above Afghanistan,

drone jockey hovering above a house on computer screen.

He knows someone’s inside. Is it his target? Who else

inside—cooking, crawling—will not outrun his digital will?

He is cross hairs and shaking frame. Stone implosion.

He watches the collapse replay on-screen, then

heads home. Pizza. Diaper rash. Removes a thumb

from his toddler’s sleeping mouth. Again, no sleep.… Our game’s

quaintly obsolete. On mailboxes around our neighborhood,

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,

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