from part one of Diary of a Wave Outside the Sea
By Dunya MikhailThrough your eye
history enters
and punctured helmets pour out.
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Thanks
By Yusef KomunyakaaThanks for the tree
between me & a sniper's bullet.
I don't know what made the grass
Love Song for a War God
By Maria Melendez KelsonEvery part of you contains a secret language.
Your hands and feet detail what you've done.
Your appetite is great, and like the sea,
Infinite Regress of War
By Myra SklarewIn the mirror of infinite regress
go back. Go back to Vietnam. To a man
who can spot a trip wire fine as a hair,
Mercy
By Tyehimba Jessthe war speaks at night
with its lips of shredded children,
with its brow of plastique
A Building Away
By Denise BergmanShe is a neighbor a building away, we talk weather and potholes, exchange
names Mary same as her daughter or is she Marissa or Maria I was distracted
her nephew was chewing the leg of his doll and the day was disappearing before
Domestic Affairs and Foreign Policy
By Pam UschukIf we shoot past one another
like asteroids on a collision course with Mars,
our tongues acidic with accusations
Dick Cheney’s New Heart Speaks
By Melissa TuckeyA roadside bomb is planted in every chest
I was a pea sized fist in the dirt of a man
who had half your brains
Hearing of Alia Muhammed Baker’s Stroke
By Philip MetresHow a Basra librarian
could haul the books each night,
load by load, into her car,
True Peace
By Sam HamillHalf broken on that smoky night,
hunched over sake in a serviceman's dive
somewhere in Naha, Okinawa