at karbala

carl boon

Seven girls pretending

to be angels, pretending they came from afar,

wept against what used to be his body

in the courtyard of the mosque

they call Imam Husayn at Karbala.

They don’t know why the Americans came—

some line in the sand went awry,

some bargain lost. They drift. That’s

a bullet hole in his cheek, that’s

a fragment of a poem he’d written

for his mother. That’s not him,

but almost, they say, as they lay him

below twin pines, creasing flowers.

He’d been a boy who played soccer

and carried driftwood for the fires

from the Euphrates on Sundays.

We saw bits of cartilage on cement;

we saw blood inside the doorway

of Khalil’s bakery. They shot him

in the Holy Month and quickly went

to dream of race cars and Iowa,

Iowa and how it felt to be in love.