Three citizens, a flower

Leaves in a pond in an almost-rose, a thirty-year-old defacement

by a mortar shell explosion

at my feet.

If more than three people were killed, the asphalt is filled with red resin, a rose.

Bloody, or floral?

Concrete scars.

An abstract scar is when mother turns on the news at our first dinner together in twenty-four months,

listens carefully, like her parents did not

the last time.

At six years old, I was asked what I hated. Him, his chin, his little eyes, his hatred,

my hatred

a child’s, now on TV, at twenty-three.

“We were too young for too much,” sister sighed today,

so let me check—at what age were  you

ready for war?

I despised the idea that I would write in this language, more yours than mine.

Pain’s a mistake you taste after a rich meal,

you spit and push it away, full. It runs in our veins.

But I’m not us with my boundaries, my suitcase, a repeated rodeo.

No need to pretend any of this is mine. Just fear—

do you fold it like trousers or like a shirt?

Grandmother’s afraid of things only she sees: people, their screams.

A man in a wheelchair hides in her clock, other men, with guns, on chairs

she arranges for them facing the news.

They may be the only ones eager to fight this war of ghosts, echoes

we hear through the window mother won’t replace because our future is robbed

once again. She says people are tired, too tired this time.

Next time I come, will leaves in a pond form a rose or a lily?

We pray not to be or know the names of those who will have died

at our feet.