“What brings you in today?” She asks
after charging into the white light exam room
as if bombs fall outside.
The war, 5000-miles away
Have blasted my insides
The arguments
Undamming rivers in my internal caverns
Interrupting my day like a ritual
Dehydration. Dizziness
What I keep to myself:
Thoughts of the hostages
harden in my stomach,
The dead, float like
ghosts in my mind.
It was like this once before, I say
when the Towers fell with my cousin inside.
Only now, do I think:
Maybe he wasn’t inside at all?
“I was in the army,” she says.
“Iraq”, “PTSD…”
I imagine her by the waters of Babylon
holding a soldier’s hand
while insides spill.
For the length of a medical visit
my imagination roamed the wreckage of another’s mind
and hers, mine.
I leave, onto tests
with answers as elusive as a page of Talmud
and return to months of more bombs,
more dead,
more haunted, living people.
