by Hugh Coyle

i

Last night, between skirmishes, we crept
away from our lakeside camp
and carved lines of love on the ice
with knives and the tips of bayonets.
Dawn came; the warm sun rose
and read our poems, its critical eye
erasing the rhymes.  When we returned
the next night, the lake bore scars,
our day – old scribblings welted over.
The youngest of us, a drunken
infantryman, cursed such abject
spurning and stamped his foot,
triggering the lake’s reply: a whooping
boom followed by a fissure and a split.

Each night that followed, you
set out across the ice, wordless
and lost to us.  You slept on opaque
surfaces, distrusting transparency,
yet returned in time for morning
line – ups, questioned but never daring
to explain your blackened, frostbitten lips.

ii

The corporal ordered
the heaviest private to sit
on the insurgent’s chest
and listened for the outrush
of breath, the crush of ribs
and collarbone, the soft surrender
of lungs and heart,
while another soldier
stopped up the nostrils
and plugged the windpipe
with clods of mud and stones
wedged in back of the teeth.

“The bodies,” he explained,
his shoulders drooping
to mimic the weight
of deep water, “Stay down longer;
don’t float up or dance
about in the current.”

I paused like a foreigner
confused by arcane custom.

He mimicked a breast stroke
for clarity.  “Surface.  Swim
back up,” again as if spirits
could push and part water.

I listened to his explanation
and now can’t repress it.
The story fills with air and rises
of its own accord, bloated
as it is with the stolen
breath of its own retelling.

iii

The chaplain dead, you addressed
the troops with pennants pulled
from your mouth, silk and felted
cashmere.  Crafted as prayer
flags, some later unfurled
as banners in battle, royal blues
and saffron yellows stained
by the luxury of blood that war
affords.  On your return, you held them
out like tortured comrades, laid them
on the bed of the empty page.
You resurrected alphabets
from the broken bones of their letters;
stitched together first words, then
sentences that raced to the margins,
unapologetically.
You made of your body a character
meaning one thing and one thing only: love.
You stood before us, arms open, all of us
suspect that each wink was an instance
of blindness, each smile a fracture passing.

by Tony Hoagland

How could you, Shahid, have been so cruel,

as to show us what self–love looked like?
Was it a kind of punishment?
It was like giving copies of the Kama Sutra
to people without genitals.

“I am a slave to pleasure,” you said once,
and paused, in your lascivious way;
“because she is such a sweet master.”
And then you smiled, like sugar.

How could you tolerate us, anyway?
with our pale, thin faces, and our loyalty
to pain?  Did you love us for our poverty,
like Mother Teresa?

Were you making a donation?
And when we used our suspicion
to hold you at bay,
you simply loved our suspiciousness.

Thus you overcame us.
“Your wealth shall uncover their worthiness,”
says the Koran.
“Who put the ooo in boudoir ?” you purred.

You knew    we knew    you knew.
Then you were gone, like sugar.
And the dark seemed sexier
for having swallowed you.

Forrest Gander

*          *          *

So the present
hoses itself out.  And with it —

Sitting in the lobby of the clinic,
its walls painted
like children’s rooms with starfish

and trains and jungle birds
and the children shuttling back and forth, the nurse
calling their name and a few words

in English or Spanish, the children
taking their mother’s
or father’s hand,

trailing the nurse past
a registration desk, down
the hall, the sequence of closed doors,

toward the one door open.  Radiance inside.  Bald
children wearing hats, and a bald baby in a mother’s arms, and
here in the lobby, where I wait for you

to be X–rayed,
some stranger whose exhaustion
can’t be fathomed, begins to snore.  If this

is the world and its time, as irrevocably it is,
when I step out into sunlit air
suffused with sausage smoke and bus exhaust,

with its relentless ads
for liquor and underwear,
where am I then?

by Peter Marcus

The world scoured
by mop, broom and rain.

Landscapes fallow
as the moon, as my mother

fretful without her wig
between the chemotherapies.

As I traveled north
from Leh toward Srinagar,

the women gradually
hid themselves.  First hair,

then lips, then the eyes
dimmed like two winter suns

beyond shapeless clouds.
My mother’s collected works:

keeping the house spotless
and playing competent bridge.

And recently added to her list:
staying alive for my father.

What is this veil
between you and me?  Where

is that bridge on which
one might cross back?

A first edition hardcover,
glacial and untainted

in the middle of a crowded shelf,
pressed on both sides

into obscurity.
While within your poems

nothing hidden
but the end,

which in itself
is an endlessness.