Near Kyiv
To war is to extract, to exploit the binaries
that never redefined singularity. Identify
yourself: I am the loaded language
crossing the imagination as the thinning city
stalls out an infantry.
They're advancing, militant men of crass legends.
Oil prices skyrocket as the oligarchs measure sanction
with imported goods. American peanut butter is 50¢ more.
In Kramatorsk, Russian missiles dropped on a train station
like paper planes, or were the people the paper,
some escaping into the western plains?
A few cents more for Bucha’s mass unconvering of graves.
The earth scattered for Putin to plant seeds, whatever trees
grow on their land will be bodies reaching for the sky.
Yachts, a couple mansions, maids traveling miles to scrub
a floor worth their entire community. Those are the people required
to ask the lawmakers for union.
Life today will be virtually opened, metal shards on concrete bridges
where invasion is detailed. Bombs on the backs of convoys
positioned toward apartments filled with Ukrainian citizens. What
do women do against the possibility of losing a child?
She tells the tyrant, up yours. She shaves her head
bald and nests in the bile of her country, digs deep into the veins
where other mothers had dug.
Let us touch the ground to see how hard it shakes. Someone
has to make the milk run. Someone has to be the hero
though we praise the savoir for putting his life on the line.
Is the savior a woman?
Put her in marble, tin and copper at the edge of some city--
Don't give her away
unarmed in hand. Her
child will waddle to his bereaved mother,
missiles covering sky like moving clouds—
Look, Ma, it's a shoe string.
He points up. The sky is tying knots.
she quivers from a missile landing
40 miles or so away. The swallowing of road and man-made swamp
will howl on civilians. What are they fighting for if not
to live?