From TO HEAR A WAR FROM FAR AWAY

The content, I’m warned, is sensitive.
As if it feels. I play the reel, ephemeral, whose life-
line is modeled after a fever or mayfly.
Nightmare and daylight. The rainbow remains
on the toddler’s knee. The trees are felled
forever. I remember a funeral and a spell
against the unbearable: what is sown
as perishable is raised imperishable— The toddler
is where now? The headline’s half-
life is brief. Three half-lives tied top and bottom
in white bags. I played the reel. If you squint:
clouds. If you invent, hail fell all night
on their tents. Someone braided her hair
before they buried her. One after another, a person
cut the cedars. In whose mind a tree might be
making air for an enemy. In whose enemy
a mind might be making a tree. Do you see
what I’ve made of you? Sensitive,
what you’ve conjured: blossoms and bees
in your branches. 

//

For a short time, the unutterable,
fresh like a wound in the mind
of the like-minded mothers.
Blame the torn borders of the body.
The cortisol rollercoaster. Cradling pomelo-
headed babies, we scrolled the small hours
past our magnitude and bond, thumbs
light on the screen, the way once
they glided over lips, pre-kiss, tapping the broken
heart emoji, the crying face emoji. Hunger
pinning us immobile every hour or two but our
horreur sans frontiers floating like so
many drones over other lives, downloading
what to the soul’s harddrive? I’ve heard
it said it isn’t over. I’ve heard the cloud
is running out of room. Emojis falling like rain.
The storm drains to the river, the river
to the sea, the GoFundMe tosses restlessly
in its screen. The toddlers don their doctors
coats to dry our play tears, offer play pills, yell Clear
and press the plastic paddles here
where once they ate. Our play hearts
pretend to begin again. 

//

 It was my phone or a dream where a girl said
We are not dead. It is you who kill us
who are dead.

//

Winter eyes the end of itself.
A few warm days tremble in the air
like a fragile ceasefire. Elsewhere,
a fragile ceasefire. If this stage of negotiations
proves fruitless— Here, sun and dogs
whittle a soul free from each
snowman, grotesque core about
to disappear, entire. —the president has greenlit
a return to hostilities. A man returns
to the nothing that was made for him
with a cat and a sapling to plant
in the nothing. An American death-
row inmate asked for a single olive
as his last meal, whose pit he’d put
in the pocket of the jacket
he’d be buried in. For this idea,
I’d have pardoned him. I’m not
the president. An olive is a fruit.
It has a seed inside like a soul.