The Brooklyn Rail

The Story I Promised Not to Tell 

features a boy, beloved, snug in his olive
uniform, gun slung over his shoulder—soldier
praised for refusing the high-ranking officer
entry without ID because rules are rules and no
amount of shouting from a reddening commander
matters if you don’t know the man’s name or face.
The boy, I’m told, handled the officer with firm grace
and someone above was watching, captured
the moment on film and granted the boy his dream
of becoming a sniper atop a building, so he, too,
can watch from above. All the stray dogs break
the boy’s heart—he promises to kill anyone who kills
a dog. But a person, reminds his mother, means more
unless they pop from the hole to take you. We remember 
the boy bobbing in floaties, charming strangers as children
do when alive and splashing, cootchie coo cootchie coo.
I tell his mother I’m leaving for the hole. She hopes
someone denies me entry—you have kids don’t
be crazy. I tell her I need to see and put to body 
what I know from people’s stories and books and TV. 
Some call it bearing witness. I call it landing on earth
where boys persist amidst glistening branches clinging
to olives, and gravity exists. Where has the boy been?
In his bedroom he shows me different types of bullets—
the curved ones are the ones that can cut through two
people at once. Unfortunate if behind your target
your mother happens to stand or wave her hands. 
I lower my eye to the ocular lens and find a red cross
flashing. Make of him a monster, screams the commander
in me, to serve the right side of history. I offer him
a pot of dragon pearl tea. I show my ID. I can only see
the sun if I am sun-like, said Plotinus in different words,
and in third person. Do not go roughly into the worst
of nights, said the dead. The story I promised not to lose
features a boy holding his brother, or filling 
an amber dispenser to its brim—olive 
oil for you: second person point of view: shimmering
mother, once removed.

Goat

I forget I am an animal and snap
a pic of my horned and hairy kin chomping wild

buckwheat and heather as the sun begins
her hued ascent—coral, purple—mapping a new horizon

we call mountain or Tinos or cloud or Turkey. Our geography
stumbles at the startle of light’s expanse, its beams

flooding my dream that night of a home I promised
to exchange for my own, then reversed the transaction

faced with the homemade stove, raw and dripping
terra cotta, and the checkerboard of cubed cabinets

installed on the kitchen wall—functionless and lifeless,
despite the owner’s claim to Original Art

built by children frozen in a single age
on their mother’s alter, and gravely missing

the mark—a kind of empire I’ve stopped
upholding. The only thing I wished to keep was the rainbow

paper snake flattened by glass, suggesting bodies pressed
to aesthetic revelation, like the book about the unhappy crows

gathering colorful reptilian skins to wear as robes,
extravagant in their branches. I remember I am an animal,

toothed and bucking and soiled inside the portal
I’ve known across dreams—home across

homes: the lush garden moulting cyclamen
and olives and marigolds, and the old

wooden staircase leading to this unearned paradise
where my dead landlord sits, offering my daughters

a bowl of cheddar goldfish. Stay, the dream insists, rubbing
the backs of my ears. Repeat after me. And I do.