After Action Report or Body Bag with Letters in Latin Script
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- After Action Report or Body Bag with Letters in Latin Script
On the corner the Christian who works the juice stand carves a cross into the web of his hand with a needle.When the desert kills for you your first living thing your tongue will already be cut out by the heat.
Smoke coated the people like pomade. The call to prayer was buoy till it sank.White phosphorous retracted that incendiary city on the tongue of the Euphrates—I could write this poemwearing a hat of dust, a shawl of dust, the dirt-sand-blood-smoke as a garment.
The love of my life was a lifetime ago & a Muslim I wasn’t supposed tobury in a Christian graveyard way past the middle of the war. My heart is a Christian graveyard.The alphabet, a body bag I keep having to zip closed.
If you don’t get it by now here is where you get God. Where you get down and pray. Where the sand ishumorless in this place I love so much I close my eyes to smell. The rain would battle the kitchen sinkif it rained; the snow would form a pillow if it snowed here, & I am here in the small of a first floor apartment,taking each breath from the screen, asking for my next death to be up close. You won’t know it’s me till you see the jasmine of my eyes. [End Page 267]
After Fallujah we made the children of our enemies literate though we tally the number of deadin a Latin script. Lord, protect the raven-haired girl
who has already seen death from above. An inability to sweat made the wild dogs vulnerableand what it would mean to let down even a single tear. [End Page 268]
ALYSIA NICOLE HARRIS hails from Alexandria, VA. She received her MFA in poetry from NYU and is currently a PhD candidate in linguistics at Yale University. A two-time Pushcart nominee and winner of the 2014 & 2015 Stephen Dunn Poetry Prizes, she has published poetry in the Indiana Review, Catch & Release, Solstice Literary Magazine, and Vinyl Magazine, among others. Her poem “Crow’s Sugar” was recently selected by Tracy K. Smith for publication in Best New Poets 2015. Alysia was the 2015 Duncanson Artist-in-Residence at the Taft Museum of Art in Cincinnati. Forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, her first chapbook, How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars to Stars, won the 2015 New Women’s Voices Series Contest. She lives in Atlanta, GA.
