Owning It 

It being so early, or is it    
                            so late, no tremor in through the panes,      
in this underlit quiet I tour
                              the internal terrain, to investigate
all the hushed-up insurrections staged 
                                       under the skin, those suppressed 
swells of rebellion. At the time each
                                      may’ve seemed just an insistent twinge
or an ache, you know how a tendon
                                  along the side of a knee complains
when you’ve taken the first steep hill
                                       since winter — well, looking back
in this unrippled stillness, I witness
                                       the ruins of deadly fights. Lives
and lives I crushed, sealed off, torched
                                         and barrel-bombed, and the news never
surfaced. Oh, there was a cramp,
                                 a few days of lumbar spasm, those clams
or an oyster that didn’t agree with me. So
                                           no front-page stuff. Truth is, I was
the next little despot, the Putin, Pol Pot,
                                            the umpteenth ape at the top who refuses 
to be relieved of his post. I was far
                                      from conscious enough, nowhere close
to seeing my part. I was so sure
                                 the toxins were osmosing in 
from outside, the dollar-bill ink,
                                   the micro-aggressive polymer snippets
in everything we eat and drink. I never
                                       figured my nature was trouble. But I had
hollered my hollow heart out 
                             nose-to-nose with my mother, my kid,
lover and friend. Let my tongue whip 
                                     gashes across my father’s chest. Why 
wouldn’t I, in such fevered blindness,
                                       also slice down the most innocent
uprisings inside this fiefdom my flesh?
                                        No, it’s worse. I’d toast the thrum
in my gut’s murder plexus, order open
                                      the inner gates, and with a curse bless
the pogrom called down unprovoked
                                   on the million hidden hopeful children
thriving on my breath’s oxygen. I
                                  could say I learned from the world, but I
see it now, I was born ready
                             to turn this way, to burn and shackle 
and starve and brand and gouge 
                               whoever in me uncrouches, unbows, who 
rises to dance with the doe by the hedge, 
                                          who kneels again to offer the rabbit
a few strands of grass from his palm,
                                      scats jazz with the pair of pacing crows 
holding out for his sandwich crust, nests 
                                          his head on his gramma’s belly, hears 
her tell, in a soft tissue-conducted 
                                     rumble, how the autoimmune-diseased 
body of Europe seized up several
                                 strains of itself to erase with arrangements 
of rifles, trains, fences, and poisoning
                                         chambers, so systematically well.

.

No Hope Makes a Missile  

My sleeplessness at this distance 
mails a donation of nothing to Kyiv.        

My sped-up heart runs me closer
to no Russian’s gun barrel. I divert

no bullet’s path. And no prayer 
of mine spares an old man by a window. 

No hope makes a missile plough 
into a field not a hospital. And neither

one of my hands flies from this night 
into that choked daylight to coax 

a shellshocked defender’s finger
to finish squeezing a trigger. No 

curse out of anger’s lake, no matter 
my rage’s black leathery wings 

and flaming breath, crisps a conscript 
lured from Novosibirsk or Irkutsk.  

At my age, still wishing my wishes 
could kill or save! Could throw a rope 

out of care’s coil to one instant
orphan in that storming of fools. 

To one child who’ll know, soul’s eye
catching the line as it falls

out of the haze. To take hold.
Don’t let go now. Don’t let go.

.

From Pictures of Beautiful Bakhmut   

They won’t find all the bodies. They can’t          
comb the ruins and not themselves

be felled. The dead’s limbs, innards, brains 
that held unforgettable days for years —

even the lost’s long-dutiful bones — break
down under rain and boots and the pressing

tread of steel vehicles, the crash of more 
missiles, thud-roar of more collapsed walls. 

In fresh charry rubble, in blood-damp dust, 
parts of homeland defenders mix 

with what’s left of boys trucked-in 
from other lands’ towns they’d never left 

till this. Stirred with bits of men promised 
good pay to come kill here. Blend 

in flesh-nourished ground. Grubs, worms, 
molds, roots thrilled to drink broth 

that’ll fill spring’s flowering stems — these 
wildly grateful for men’s fatal courage. 

I can’t call it beautiful, though I know it is 
beautiful — the soon-green field, 

whether or not they till. Whatever 
they do or don’t build. Barn, armory, school. 

Uncountable human molecules strewn 
beneath the feet of the young. And the old 

who’ll never leave. Who are now weaving
slowly across the front lines, foraging

through the crumbled homes. Those eyes,
at once craters and oasis pools

in their faces’ creased terrain — they shine 
that flinty glow of the earth’s grinding.      

Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (winner of the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and forthcoming, Learning to Hold (winner of the Wandering Aengus Press Editors’ Award). His fifth chapbook is The Arcane Mechanics of Constant Lift (winner of the Sheila-Na-Gig Chapbook Competition). Recent work appears or is forthcoming in Rattle, The Poetry Review (UK), RHINO, The Greensboro Review, Rust + Moth, Terrain.org, On the Seawall, Solstice, Nimrod International Journal, and elsewhere. Myers lives in Seattle, where he’s Editor of the journal Bracken.