Words

My son does not have a lot of language, and

His older brother finds me in the laundry room,

Taking wet clothes out of the washing machine,

The arms and hearts of our shirts heavy, because

He is asking me, asking, when will he talk to me

And I tell him all the right things,

How his brother is talking, trying to anyway,

How every day there is another word, or how

Soon his words will string together,

Into the sentence he wants to hear.

How when they do, he can wear them,

His brother’s sentences, on his wrist

Like bracelets.

And I take him upstairs,

Where his brother is sleeping, and I show him,

What he already knows, how to listen, how to

Press his head against his brother’s head, and

Hear his words circulating inside his skull,

Like a shell, and

Later, when we are in bed, and it is

Dark, my husband asks me, what,

What is it, and I say, nothing,

Not because I don’t know, but

Because I just don’t want to talk about it,

About the things I don’t tell my sons, how

The world is not as good as I say it is,

How I have seen a photograph of a boy,

Sitting in the back of a pickup truck, next

To the dead bodies of his family, and how

There are children who are soldiers, who

Wear bombs and ride bicycles and blow

Themselves up, how sometimes words

Mean nothing.

Birthday

When you came home from war,

You gave me a stone shaped like a heart,

A piece of rock mined in Afghanistan,

That you bought in a marketplace in Kabul,

Before they sent you home to America,

A stone called lapis lazuli, as blue as the sky,

How you wanted it to have my name on it,

And the man carved each letter in,

With a pocket knife,

But this was before,

Before you were home for awhile,

Before I realized that a part of you

Was still gone, and before

You lay next to me, in bed, and in our darkness,

And told me you loved me, but that you wanted

To go back, build schools, and help, and the words

Weeks and months and maybe crawled between us

Twisting and turning, like snakes.

Today is your birthday,

And you are saying, maybe I should forget about Afghanistan,

Because nothing you have tried to do,

To help, has worked.

And I place my hand on your chest,

Spreading my fingers across your heart,

Like a wing,

And I tell you, I understand now,

Because I was there on 9/11,

Because my body will always be filled

With towers falling down, metal shards

And dust, arms and legs of the people

Jumping,

How inside your chest, the cavity there,

Lies Afghanistan, the land, and mountains,

And people, dirt and bombs and guns and

The men who called you their brother,

And I whisper to you what you already know,

How you cannot forget

What you will always remember.

Ventricle

When a soldier deploys to war,

He goes to a country with

Bombs and bullets, and wears

Kevlar body armor, with plates,

A ballistic chest plate covering

His heart,

And when a soldier patrols a town,

He carries his M4, like a limb, and

Enters compounds made of sand,

With corridors that wind around

Like arteries and veins.

He knocks down doors, each one,

A valve, and inside, this chamber,

A dark room, with families inside,

Women, children, and men,

Men who say, this is our home,

Pointing to it,

The darkness that surrounds them,

This room where they live,

A ventricle, and the land outside,

Afghanistan,

Full of blood,

Like a heart.

Beautiful

We are standing near the computer,

And I am showing my son a photograph,

Taken in the Arctic Ocean by scientists,

Of the ocean, where there are frost flowers

As far as you can see, tiny blossoms of ice,

On the surface of the freezing water, and

It is what happens when the air gets colder

Than anything else, I explain to him, how

The ocean turns into a meadow.

How unexpected, I say,

But he is not surprised,

Because my son is a child and he expects it,

The world to be this beautiful,

Later I will let him stay up until midnight,

Because this is New Year’s Eve,

The beginning of another year,

And after he goes to bed, and the house

Grows darker, I will check on him,

And his little brother, asleep, with

Their small chests rising, cavities

Of their bodies, like vessels,

And I will wish,

Wish for them,

That they will never know war,

Or how the geography of continents

Is also the topography of battle, and

Humans killing one another,

Dead bodies, slain children, or hatred,

Because they are young and they are my children,

I will wish for them,

That their world stays beautiful.

Slide

I am reading The Blue Cascade,

A book by a Marine

I know, who went to war in Iraq,

And was an artillery liaison officer,

Attached to an infantry battalion,

And a forward observer, who

Made the radio call for what got hit,

And who got killed, and when, or how

There was a time he found a taxi

On the side of the road, parked

Near a roadblock, with bullet holes,

Probably because it did not stop,

And there was a brain of a small girl,

Her skull and flesh and blood and hair,

Splattered and spread, in pieces, there,

Across the backseat, and on the window,

And how he buried

Her sandals on the side of the road, and

How his friend buried her brain.

My husband is a soldier, too,

And he was gone,

For fifteen months at war in Afghanistan,

And he is sliding into the passenger seat

Of our station wagon, the belt crossing

His chest like the strap of his M9, and

He is sliding his combat boots into closets,

Sliding his body into our bed,

Sliding his hands over my back,

My spine, like a row of forgotten rounds,

And he is saying, this feels too easy, and

I know what he means, his face,

This outpost of war in my dark,

How coming home from war is never easy,

How what you see you can never forget,

And how he is sliding his life back on,

Like skin, over his war blasted heart.

Hurricane

The hurricane hits America,

After it hits Haiti and the Bahamas and Jamaica and Cuba,

And as I watch it on my television,

A swirling white cloud, it is killing people,

Flooding cities, destroying homes, and

Shutting down power,

And I check the airlines,

Again, before telling my sons,

That their father, who is deployed, to Italy,

For a week, how his flight is canceled, and

He cannot come home, for at least one more week.

We are lucky, I tell them, two days later,

As I dress them up, in costumes,

For Halloween, lucky because the hurricane did not hit us,

Because we still have power, still have our house,

And lucky because we are still alive,

And I tell myself the same thing,

I am lucky, as I walk down these dark streets,

Streets that slink and cross over one another,

Like snakes, watching children run across grass,

From house to house, ringing doorbells, and how,

When no one answers, they say,

I know they are in there.

And I am thinking about all of us,

These children, here, swimming

In the darkness of an American street,

The children somewhere else wading

Through waist high flood water, and

All the children of war,

Walking through a sea of dead bodies

Just to get drinking water, or a woman

In Santiago, holding a child on a roof,

Waiting for help to come before the water does,

The woman in Kandahar holding a child to her chest,

Bloody, dead, and hers,

And me, standing here, lucky,

In the middle of street, holding a flashlight,

And shining it, across this darkness,

Like a searchlight.

Arming

It is night in America.

And in this house, on a television,

There are men, who talk about arms.

About how we should arm them,

Rebels from another country, so

They can take over a bad regime.

And I know about the violence,

How war spreads across all of us,

Like darkness across grass, or how

People kill people every day in war,

Leaving them, dead, in the street,

Like animals.

And I am thinking about arms too,

Not machine guns or a sniper rifle,

But about arms,

The arms that no one is talking about,

Arms made of skin,

Wrapped around bone, with tendons,

And veins, muscle, and blood, or how

There is a photograph of my husband

From the war in Afghanistan, a child

From a school, with no water, her arm,

Reaching, out, towards his hand, or

A soldier, just after a bomb detonates,

How he feels the force of the explosion

Blow off both of his arms, how the bone

Rips out of the socket, and all the civilians,

The children, who are shot dead, or killed,

By bombs, lying, in rows, on streets, and

Under blankets, or

How their arms are positioned like that,

Down, at their sides, like soldiers, and

My own child, just three years old, and

Asleep, in his bed, on his back,

With his two arms, stretched,

Up, over his head, as if he is surrendering.

My husband and I, in this bed, in America,

With his arm, slung across my chest,

Like an ammunition belt.