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War & Violenceexpand_moreMa didn’t believe in slapping. It was what common people did.
When he kisses me, my heart flutters in my chest like swarming bees.
I have studied and become intimate with the speed of darkness.
this country will stick it to infiltrators imprison traitors love neighbors
“As your brother, I ask you, how did you get that scar on your face?”
We see how tired you are as you lean on your rifle or your shovel.
If you let me live, I will buy you beer whenever I see you in town.
Men like me and my brothers filmed what we planted for proof we existed.
When the snake attacked the soldier, its fangs left a violent opening.
Debra Hughes
The three of us share a myth, that I’m fragile as old bones. My parents speak in low voices—about me, I’m pretty sure. I watch the waitress, trying to remember how to flirt. I take off my mask.
When I think on it, I can’t believe I’m going to kill two people over weed.
He was ready to move on, to touch his patients, to cut them open.
This is the woman who had shrunk so small, nobody could find her.
Ajax killed men and then animals thinking they were men.
Fatwas condoned our arrest for the rouged contours of our lips.
There was a shout, then a shot fired. I pressed the shutter again and again.
After several months, I worked up the courage to share a war poem.
I’m recalling his socks, the inked initials, the splashes of blood.
My brother stealing all the lightbulbs, my parents live without light.
Condemned to an easy life balanced on the suffering in another land.
A sociopathic streak on my father’s side I try to put to good use.
“Oh, Jesus.” It’s the greatest shame since 1929’s stock market.
Ike’s voice left behind on the shore as Tina plunges in again.
They cut you off, let fall your hammered silver bracelets to the sand.
A boy in a dress vanishes beneath the sound of his own galloping.
Ajax can answer all this killing only with the killing of himself.
We press closer to look at a picture: a handcuffed boy leaning toward us.
Lebanon’s sky was full of stars. The sky here doesn’t have any stars.
