We open six beers and by the second
we can watch ourselves interrogate.
We cull whispers, endless criss-crossings
of a vast onyx desert, but no confession.
At the third Bud the blows begin:
perineal strikes, carefully calibrated
and entered in a log. By the fourth,
the detainee is laughing at us,
escaping to the parched ravines
of Helmand Province. I am the child
who won’t stop hiccuping, the father
who nailed the hoop a foot too high
on the garage door, the wife on a cell
to her shrink, mom beating egg whites
with a slow whisk. By the fifth
the terrorist is dead, but here’s the sixth,
Boeing transport lit like a wedding cake,
waiting on the tarmac to take us home.
D. NURKSE is the author of ten books of poetry. Recent awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Literature Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
