Somalia. Eritrea. Burkina Faso.
Myanmar. Honduras. El Salvador.
This morning I can’t unread
How the onion the leek seller
Summoned to retrieve
The corpse of her son
Finds his head on the soccer field
The soldiers drinking grinning
You must take it home they say
Carry it through the marketplace
Following her jeering
Are you going to make soup
She must find a box a bucket
A secret patch of garden
Safe from scavengers
Animal / human
Who would unearth the skull
Keep the boy unparadised
This mother having unslept
These many nights unable now
To untongue prayer her soul
Unspooling into sky into sea
The name of her son
Unmourned in any history
Unchalked on any stone
Michael Waters' recent books include Sinnerman (Etruscan Press, 2023), Caw (BOA Editions, 2020), The Dean of Discipline (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2018), and a co-edited anthology, Border Lines: Poems of Migration (Knopf, 2020). A 2017 Guggenheim Fellow and recipient of several Pushcart Prizes and NEA, Fulbright, and NJ State Council on the Arts Fellowships, he lives without a cell phone in Ocean, NJ.