December 31, 2023Broken Sonnets with Apology for Simile
after Ilya Kaminsky
Forgive me when I tell you I survive
the year in review. You can’t tell who is
under the stitching of her purpled cheek—
the body a patchwork of all that’s been
torn in her nation. You can’t tell in which
nation a bomb ripped a bite out of her
apartment building, deleting the street
with children still playing in it, crumpled
with the ease of a newspaper. The whole
block reduced to dirt and debris. The road
you can’t tell from the soldier run over
so many times, he’s made part of the earth,
the body a path to everything torn
in his nation. Forgive me: I close the
tab like a door I’ve no fear will be blown
open and switch to my journal, review
my own year. In an entry from camping
abroad, I wrote of the still-familiar
bleed of foreign sunset, of a tent shared
with strangers—how, lying in the dark, we
are no more than the exchange of our air.
I forgot to cross a t, so it reads
like “lent,” which the attempt at religion
in me knows as a sacrifice, or a
promise. A body in sleep is the rise
of a chest. A chest is the cage around
a breath. Is breath what’s promised, or given
up? Forgive us: let their bodies breathe like bodies.
from Poets Respond