In the Forest Behind the City

You, running through the forest,
six years old, your
mother’s windpipe tight and burning
trying to breathe
your child-legs moving forward
disconnected from the other world
your family fast and silent
rushing into the trees,
no other choice but to leave the weak
and the captured to the beasts,
pushing through soft mountain air
no one could take in
for the gasping,
for the frantic fluttering of lungs. 

Saving these children
means leaving their grandmother
to be swallowed by bullets and a lake,
means barricading the brain
against the sight of him
taken to bleed into the veins
of 8000 other dying fathers and sons
by someone else’s fathers and sons
someone who didn’t raise them
for murder
who didn’t stop them
from murdering —
who couldn’t or wouldn’t — 

means her choice every night ever after is
between the terror of nightmares
and the debilitating dark nothingness 

means years from then
in our America
people say, Oh!
The war trouble in Bosnia

like they say, Oh!
the war trouble in Syria
like they say, Oh!
the cartel murders in Mexico
like they say, Oh!
the kidnappings in Nigeria 

means they will see there,
on your forehead, that faint writing: 

mother lost husband, father
died in genocide, grandmother
died in genocide.
Lived in temporary shelter
during war 

means they will see you here in your
beautiful black dress, your soft eyes,
see you here, a scholar now,
successful in the world of words and laws,
laughing at the funny ways
our kitchen switches work
or don’t
while you stand inside
your six-year-old feet
bleeding your father’s blood,
breathing air through your mother’s struggling lungs
choosing every day between
that tattoo and this portfolio,
being seen as that now-returned child war refugee
or this esteemed researcher from abroad
that survivor and this published writer
that Bosnian and this human being. 

What is the answer? I guess
we who are outside can never be whole
without touching the jagged cracks, cutting
through our skin a little,
without counting the negative space — where the
pieces are missing — as part of the world itself 

An answer? I guess there isn’t one.
Let’s just sit here together

in silence,
not understanding the human part of
the world beneath logic and historical explanation
until we laugh at kitchen switches
and malfunctioning coffee pots
and the necessity of vegetables and
the sweetness of fruit
and carpets stained by dogs with
lipstick between their toes
and the weird things you’ll see
in hardware stores and supermarkets 

until the hour
when we all go alone to choose
between remembering and forgetting
between the peaceful blankness of a night
without dreams
and the untenable blankness of a life
without truth. 

In the forest behind the city
is the slight hollow of the moss
that grows over the dirt
where you fell before your mother
lifted you without stopping
and pulled you toward
that temporary refuge.