…Let this be the Body through which the War has passed. —Frank Bidart somewhere I did not learn mow down or

SANCTUARY where we don’t have to SANITIZE hands or words or knives, don’t have to use a SCALE each morning,

I dropped down against the mosque wall curled my shoulders in let my feet fall apart tilting toward the rubble-dusted

We were barely out of middle school when Stuart showed me the scar— an S branded in his brown arm.