Part One
between the bed frame and dura mater membrane.
It had no right!
The nerve to insert itself, uninvited,
into my bedroom and before I’d had my coffee.
Naturally, I knelt outside of my body,
carpet burn on both knees trying to
pull the elephant by both ears out the room.
Each time I got a loose hold of the arsenal,
Dribbles of sweat at my fingernails would drive
the lost thing deeper until wedged into webs of the subarachnoid.
(And isn’t that always the case?
The most indelible is irrefutably the most tragic?)
Shrapnel shards were not what I feared most
but rather the eager rage— how quickly it wanted to become a part of me.
So we battled there for hours:
my human against this metallic carnivore
until night began to break free from its cloudy reign;
The half moon’s eery glow over the carpet,
wet with the weight of warfare.
Luxury is only one click away away
(conveniently blind to a young mother
breathing a bulwark over her infant)
with a hand
Whole and changed as the window into my bedroom
about// the privilege of despair I feel as an onlooker of televised war.
