September 12, 2021

Amit Majmudar

RECURRING NIGHTMARES OF RETURNING SOLDIERS

from the archives of the Lewis Stokes V.A. Hospital, Cleveland, Ohio

RODRIGUEZ

He’s upside down and turning clockwise
the same slow way Torres did
when he found him hanging in the garage.
A steel cable connects a house-arrest ankle bracelet
to a puppeteer beyond the clouds.
His head is three feet above the Swat Valley.
He knows there’s a helicopter up there somewhere
dangling him like a cherry
over the mouth of hell.
He’s naked, but he’s got his M27.
The valley crackles awake on all sides.
The dirt pops like a pond tossing
raindrops back at heaven.
He’s a bait goat.
“I can’t decide where to fire my weapon, Doc.
At the guys firing at me from the mountains,
or the chopper I know is up there somewhere.
So I curl myself up—
Torres used to work his abs that way,
knees hooked on the pull-up bar—
beast.
I curl myself up and start chewing through the cable.
Like a rat. Front teeth, like a rat.
I feel it fraying.
These little metal threads tickle my beard.
They’re shooting wild, but they’re getting tighter.
Think of dragonflies crisscrossing
less than a foot from your ears.
I think I bit my tongue last Tuesday,
though I still don’t know
where. I should feel it, right, Doc?
In the morning? If I bit
my tongue in my sleep? All I know is
I spat out a mouthful of blood on the sheets,
and I’ve got this chipped tooth right here
and no money for the dentist.
Got an edge like a skinning knife.
I’d slit my finger open if I stroked it.
Clean across.”

 

CHIRO

He’s the one who discovered Torres—
the three were housemates,
three jarheads
dropped from a height, trying
to seal each other’s cracked skulls with gold.
So when he falls asleep
he goes from room to room
discovering his whole platoon.
Trumbull in the kitchen
with a mouthful of blackberry jam.
Behind him, on the wall, a Rorschach blot
in the shape of kissing sharks.
Wyatt in the bathtub
he’s filled up by himself.
Look right: ants bristle a toothbrush. Look
left: black mold spatters the shower curtain,
Braille orders that he cannot read.
Jenks on the couch, his hand on his own head
asleep like a cat in his lap.
Diaz in the bedroom
with a giant stinkhorn rising
from his navel, death mask locked in awe
of what is growing out of him.
Every room is someone else
until he opens a door
and it’s his old room at his mom’s house.
No one in the closet, no one on the bed.
So he kneels and checks beneath the bed.
He says his own name, coos it, sings it
as he thumbs the safety,
Nicky, Nicky, where you at …

 

BRUENIG

He’d always wanted a husky, growing up.
Now he had one—on a leash
crusted with bits of glass
like the rock salt rimming a margarita.
He kept switching hands.
He was in fatigues; the street was scared of him.
And no wonder—the husky kept growing.
“Or maybe I was shrinking?
I thought I saw a sniper on the terrace.
Turned out to be a crow, but that was worse—
the husky took off after it. I lost my footing
and after getting scraped along the road
a while, I just let go—
I had to let go, sir. My palms were mush,
fatigues all torn up, pebbles
bedded in my raw thigh.
Whole town is screaming. It’s not Kabul;
smaller, residential. I go looking for him—
God knows what all he’s doing—
and I see bodies in the street.
And then I see a woman, an American.
She’s taking pictures. I’m like,
‘Don’t—this isn’t real, I can explain,
this isn’t what really happened.’
And she’s like, ‘Stop me.’
I say, ‘Don’t make me whistle.’
And she says, ‘Thought you said it’s not
your dog.’ So then I whistle. And he comes.”
At this point in the telling, he breaks
eye contact. “When he’s done with her,
he licks my hands. I let him lick my hands.
And when he’s done with them,
I turn them to my face like Muslims do at prayer,
and Doc, my hands are healed.”

 

OCAMPO

is trapped on a hospital boat in hostile waters.
He wants to wash up
but they say the scab is a blanket the blood weaves.
“Thing is, it’s not my blood. I’m fine.
It’s all somebody else’s blood on me—
someone I shot—it’s like acid on my skin.
Though how the blood got on me—
I’m a sniper. There’s no way. The guys I killed—
I was a quarter mile away sometimes.
I kept clean. That’s the one good thing about it.
You keep clean.” The only way
to wash it off is jump.
He splashes down in solid jellyfish,
the water mucusy with them, its surface
tension just enough to drop and drown him.
He’s screaming with the pain now—hydrochloric
blood and jellyfish tentacles
wrapping down his legs. (In waking
hours, this is his sciatica.)
A doctor flings something on the water
and gestures at him like she’s putting on
a crown. He swims to it.
It’s not a ring buoy, much less a crown.
It’s a loop of rope
he must thread with his neck
to survive to die.

 

LIU

He’s waiting on the steps of a jail
in handcuffs. Women
billow in black from top to toe.
The street is full of them. Each one peeks out
through her mourning,
through an eye-slit in her portable cell door.
They’re screaming, pointing, weeping at him.
“I’m like, ‘Hustle me out through the back!
Get me in a jeep!’ The Afghan cops are making
phone calls, trying not to look at me.
‘You can keep me in cuffs if you want,’ I say,
‘but you’ve got to protect me. Guys, I trained you.’
I did, in Kabul, in ’07. Teenage kids
in khaki costumes. Three weeks just to teach them
how to clean and reassemble a handgun—
warrior race my ass.
They should’ve been in art school, med school,
something. Those days? Either
go grow opium in the valley,
or sign on with the Americans. They didn’t
hate us, or at least I didn’t think they did.
These women at the jail, though—
in the dream, I mean—they surge to the foot of the steps.
I feel them tugging my fatigues.
So I’m all, ‘Why’ve you got me on display?
Take me inside, for fuck’s sake.’ Sorry, Doc.
God’s sake, I should’ve said. I should’ve said
I’ve got a lot of blood on me. It’s even crusted up
my hair. A kid who’s maybe sixteen
wearing the Sharpie badge I made him
raises a handgun to my temple.
The mob gets even louder. He lowers the gun
and shoves me from behind.
I’m on their hands now, crowdsurfing at a concert,
weightless …” He shakes his head. “I’m waiting
for all these women to drop me to the pavement,
stomp me, stab me, run off with my dog tags.
But I don’t wake up with a gasp just then,
they set me down. Safe. On the other side.”
I ask, “The other side of what, Tim?”
He shakes his head. “Of everything.”
“So they were demonstrating for you?”
The sobs break through. “They were there to break me
out.”

 

PORTER

Night in Chicago. All the streetlights shattered.
He takes a premature right to avoid an invasion
of ambulances. He can’t quite tell
if that’s a dog or a child weaving
in front of his car. His headlights go out.
Whatever it is, he’s hit it. He kills
the engine. All the houses have metal fences,
choke-chains that have lost their Dobermans.
He tries to find the body.
There’s a crowd marching up the street.
Even if he hasn’t killed
someone’s dog or someone’s son here,
he’s got an ARMY STRONG sticker
on his rear windshield that’s going to be
the death of him. He’s on it,
scraping frantically. His nails break off
and bleed. The mob is getting
closer. Someone rushes
out of hiding. “This’ll get the stain out.”
It’s a hammer. As the people stream past,
he’s on the hood of his own car
smashing his own windshield.
Sobbing as they cheer him on.

from Poets Respond
September 12, 2021

__________

Amit Majmudar: “This poem is about the veterans who have returned and will be returning from our foreign wars. I remember working with many during my training, since we rotated through the Cleveland V.A. hospital. Killing kills something in the killer.” (web)

 

Tonight on Rattlecast 110: Vince Gotera! Join us live at 8pm EDT …

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September 9, 2021

Amit Majmudar

THE MIGRATION DIARY OF HALA ALMASI

Fish would have eaten my eyes
if my eyes didn’t look
so much like fish eggs. Little black
dots suspended in jelly. My ovaries
are clumps of fish eggs. I will lay them
one by one in foreign toilets: Little red
drops between my thighs, curling
like ink in the water,
like smoke from your mouth.

*

Don’t ask me what it was like. I have no
similes for you. “But you’re a poet,
Hala.” No. I am like
a poet. I think a lot about what I have
lost. I wrap my head and hair
like I am still bleeding
from the ears. The face
it frames is not the face
I had back home. This face is just my likeness.
And that is where the similarity ends.

*

I have left a language
in the mirror over a cracked sink
in Kabul. That is why
left to right reads write I everything
in my head. Call it mirror writing,
like da Vinci’s notebooks: Women’s
beautiful severed heads floating
free among siege machines,
tanks, a giant crossbow … I was launched
by a crusader catapult
over the wall of your city. My head
with my tongue missing. My tongue
with my tongue missing. My tongue
missing my tongue.

*

Apocalypse means
unveiling, means
stripping away, down,
bare. What does it mean when the white
man trying to enter me
in a database asks
Sweetie, aren’t you hot
under all that
cloth?

*

The man on the bus who said
what he said did not see me. He saw
my average of 4.2 offspring. I am
a pomegranate refugee, a dirty bomb
full of placentas and human
shrapnel, a mama fly baggy
with maggots. I have imagined dying
continuously for the past
4.2 years, so it’s sweet of his
hatred to imagine so much life
for me, in me. I don’t know
whether to pat his hand
and tell him I like women
or point at the place where I
hunger and whisper Quintuplets.

*

First it was “Only a husband
will make you happy, Hala.” Now:
“Only a baby will make you
happy, Hala.” I will be happy only
if my body
sleeves another body. Ideally
a male one. If I fled in the heat
back home, I can flee
in the snow out here. In this new
country, I want new
blessings. May the icicles
in your mouth turn into
fingers. May the shudder
in your legs turn into
a daughter.

*

I rub my nose in old book smells
all day until 5 p.m., working
along each row of blossoms,
a systematic hummingbird.
Sometimes I’ll read one slowly
in a cushiony green chair and not
a single bomb taps me
on the shoulder
to inform me it’s time to leave
the country,
to close my life like a book,
like a whole library
shuttering its eyes,
left behind
for someone else to burn.

*

I have one friendship
that’s survived. One surviving
friend, I should say.
My husband worries
the internet will corrupt me.
If you write me about my poems, friend,
just know
it may be weeks before I tiptoe
back to this account.
The risk is not corruption,
it’s corrosion. All this rain
beats the wife
out of me. My bronze
skin bruises blue,
oxidizes green. One day
I swear the rust will
lock my legs shut.

*

Faith means defending
with your fists and teeth
a name, a scarf, a particular way
of bowing to the ground.
And then neglecting them
after the mob moves on.
Switching your focus
to cinnamon pecans
or a pot of basil.
The faith whose child I am
is a child in my care. There are your toys,
God: Amuse yourself,
Mommy’s busy. My child,
my oppositional
defiant child
demanding I oppose
and defy. Not
particularly wanted, really.
But no less mine for that.

*

The woman undergoes
the marriage. The woman goes under
the man’s last name. The woman goes under
the man. The woman undergoes
the parting of her seas so the man
with the staff can enter
her promised land. The woman undergoes
the miscarriage. The woman undergoes
the man’s war. The men say they promised
the women nothing. The country
goes under. The men put
the women on a raft and say:
Go. So we go. Some across, some
under.

from Poets Respond
September 9, 2021

__________

Amit Majmudar: “A refugee crisis of our own making, a botched war and evacuation, thousands of people endangered: This poem strives to get beyond the abstraction of nameless Afghans leaving for somewhere from somewhere, and follows one specific individual as she navigates her new world.” (web)

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December 28, 2020

Amit Majmudar

NAMING THE CHILD

If life is sacred from the instant of conception
why doesn’t anybody name miscarriages?
Thousands of souls from day to day touch down,
but earth to some is like a stopover in Newark.
The unlucky deplane and have to live there,
while the rest, after a head count, take off again.
On each of those heads is a caul, a jellyfish-kiss 
kippah, a contact lens that God drew off 
his own iris with the tip of his ring finger
and set atop the fontanelle, a protective seal.
A name is a caul, a full-body scuba suit of call
you echolocate yourself with when you dive
into the world. I always had a thing
for Mozart’s middle name. With Amadeus
in your name, how could you not be a genius? 
Love God!, the imperative, the standing order.
Love God! even if he bleeds your almost baby boy
out of the woman you love, the spigot turned,
the lifesmud gushing out. “Amadeus”
provoked a hard No all those years ago,
before we had our twins. This time around
when she and I got home from the hospital 
cradling four pounds one ounce of namelessness 
I sealed this almost newest sibling in a word
that meant what I was trying hard to do again,
calling our lost one, in secret, Love God!,
absurd though it was to name what never lived,
to order one who never learned to love
to love. The ears evolve at five weeks
in tandem with the heart’s awoken wink,
which is why music can do what it does to the pulse.
Did he know our voices? Both hands cupped
around my mouth, sealed to the baby bump,
I hallooed across the amniotic sea. 
Did he know I loved his not-yet-presence 
more than God’s not-quite-absence 
because one meant hope in this life, for this life,
while the other meant hope in the next?
How is it possible to lose a thing 
you never had? I had no wise advice.
I didn’t offer music to calm her sobs.
I was sobbing, too. It felt damned good. Why stop?
I didn’t tell her I had named the crimson bits
that life had chummed the waters of her with.
I didn’t call her baby, didn’t say 
Love God. I didn’t mention God at all.

from Rattle #69, Fall 2020

__________

Amit Majmudar: “I have always loved the name Amadeus—maybe it started with the movie based on the Peter Shaffer play, which I saw as a child. The meaning and musicality of it (both its own musicality, and its connection with Mozart) charmed me. I did acquiesce, though, when my wife declined that name for either of our twin sons. The poem recounts the dashed hope of a third son, dwelling now forever in our imaginations. He might have born that as his first or perhaps his middle name. I have always wondered at the strange intermediate state of the miscarriage: We lose someone we never really ‘had,’ we mourn someone who had not yet taken on an independent life of his or her own. It requires a third word, a word that doesn’t exist in any language I know of—not ‘mourning,’ but a new vocabulary to express this strange kind of mourning for the almost-was. This poem tries to conjure that diction, which must necessarily be private, an idiolect; and for me that word will be Amadeus.” (web)

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June 9, 2020

Amit Majmudar

NEWSQUIZ

Are you up on current events? Take this fun quiz to test your knowledge!

The woman wove the wicker basket

a.)    to hold the flecked eggs she found orphaned on the lawn

b.)    because her fingers deprived of this over and under would reach for a cigarette, or a gun

c.)    to carry her infant downstream into Pharaoh’s household

d.)    so the hot air balloon could float the hunted man to safety

Where the stress falls

a.)    is wherever the knee does

b.)    the structure fails

c.)    batons spondee against advancing riot shields

d.)    all of the above, just last night, downtown

An obelisk is a monument

a.)    to a slaveowner beloved for his false hair and false teeth

b.)    to the first victorious general who when begged to become a king said no

c.)    shaped like a lighthouse stranded far from the sea

d.)    and a lightning rod and the point of a spear

While the city center burned

a.)    the rocket launched the latest iteration of white flight

b.)    Nero fiddled on his phone

c.)    the suburb went for a bike ride

d.)    the prizewinning poet posted a paragraph lamenting her privilege and promising to listen more

Before you could see your country on your phone at all times, you

a.)    cherished your circadian rhythm

b.)    climbed more trees

c.)    interrogated your surroundings no further than sixth grade Social Studies

d.)    thought of kneeling as an act of humility in a cathedral

e.)    thought of getting down on one knee as how a man humbles himself before the woman he’s asking to marry him

f.)    floated down the river of your days in an oblivious wicker basket past triumphal obelisks built by slaves

from Poets Respond
June 9, 2020

__________

Amit Majmudar: “This poem responds to the complex, longstanding, and only-now-expressed catastrophe that has been playing out in cities across our country. This poem’s ‘online quiz’ format allowed the collapse, into one poem, of the violence and anguish, and the safety and frivolity, that coexist in different parts of America right now—the tumultuous cities, and the serene suburbs; the rubber-bullet brutality of real life, and the word-brutality of online life.” (web)

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April 9, 2020

Amit Majmudar

ANTIVIRAL COCKTAIL: A SEQUENCE

1. Body Armor

We make our own masks: sand dollars
tied behind the head with kite string.
We make our own gowns: red crosses
Sharpied on ponchos
in a rain foretold.
When my country had no body armor for its troops,
it told them, You go to war with the army you have.
I live in the richest country in history, or so I hear.
There are no green zones, only shrapnel
we cannot feel or see.
We go to work with the bodies we have.

 

2. An American Nurse Foresees Her Death

I stepped out of a kill-zone shaped like a bedroom
then went home to sleep in my garage.
This hand that sponged the fever off a body
waves at my kids through the living room window.
I text my husband through a weeping wall.
The scrubs go in a Mommy hamper
I warn my kids away from
with a Crayola skull and crossbones.
The face on the laptop doesn’t let on
how the knuckles sanitized raw bleed in blue gloves
and “lunch” is an apple between codes.
When the shift ends, if it ever ends,
I ghost the perimeter of my own life
and set the alarm for four thirty in the morning.
The enemy doesn’t want me working.
The enemy wants to grant me days of rest,
a bed of my own
in a kill-zone shaped like a break room.
Nurses I know are nursing nurses
through the never-ending fevers
ending them. That will be me soon,
one or the other, or one then the other.
At sign out last Friday, we didn’t say
bed numbers. We said first names.

 

3. A Plague of Crows

Corvids in a row, leeching power from the power line. Corvids
dissecting my roadkill-mound of mind. Corvids

battling, handwing shadowplay in withered elms.
The hands vanish, the darkness stays behind. Corvids

watching old men shuffle off to the crematorium,
their bones, bricks baked to build what fever designed. Corvids

insidious. Corvids nesting in the breast, the breath,
summering at every bloodwarm birdbath they find. Corvid

bogeymen to chase the kids indoors with.
Corvid invasion, the hunters shooting blind. Corvids

forty days and forty nights. Corvid orgy, corvid
elegy, mourners dressed to the nines. Corvid

carnival, Day of the Dead, skull and feathers,
showmen with no organs left to grind. Corvids

in the churches, parishioners in triage. Corvid
conquest: blackened map, surrender signed. Corvids

dive-bombing us to snatch our masks into the elms
and leave us gasping god oh corvid god be kind.

 

4. Purgatory

A virus is the ultimate
transmigrant, crossing
from body to new
body like lifesbreath
through the mouth
or nose, breathing, breeding in
a private bloodwarm springtime.
April really is the cruelest month,
choosing who will breathe
and who will not, who will seed pod
and Godspeed the virus
and who will stop

dead. A virus is a melody,
catchy. Our lungs are flowers
getting dusted
by its genetic pollen
as we speak, flaring
petals of fever.
Our tongues still have power,
so we sing to, sing
through our malady
from Tuscan balconies
like souls in Dante
waiting out purgatory,
and it’s catchy, it goes viral.

A mind still glowing from the kiln
of death anxiety
is a brick to build with.
A mind still growing in the chill
of maybe there will be no spring
this time sings to, sings
through its purgatorial
quarantine like a soul
in Dante. But if this
is purgatory, that means
there’s a heaven just ahead.
And it’s been waiting there
for all of us as long
as we have waited here
for a new earth cleansed
with breaths and breaths to spare,
a new earth masked and gowned
in nothing but the bright blue air.

from Poets Respond
April 9, 2020

__________

Amit Majmudar: “This sequence is about the lack of protective gear for healthcare workers during this global pandemic. I myself am a practicing physician, but my main concern right now is my sister, an infectious disease physician who currently runs Cook County’s HIV clinics in the South Side of Chicago. She is on a list of physicians to be called up for duty in the field hospital set up in Chicago’s McCormick Place Convention Center. I worry about her exposure and her family’s exposure a lot. These related poems, though not specifically pertaining to her, have emerged from the welter of emotions surrounding this catastrophe.” (web)

 

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