Pictures From Fallujah

Photo from the Lurie Studios


Pictures from Fallujah
after the first siege, April 2004

I.

This color
so ordinary
like
preschool children mixing
too many fingerpaints
smearing surfaces without permission

You won´t believe
this color unfolds like
overblown red roses
dying in the sun
like shingles wet with rain
or grey paint peeling to expose
the veined wood underneath

You won´t believe
the same soft pigment
would occupy or take refuge in
a burnished church door
a man´s sunburned skin
as he tears his shirt open
in front of crumbled concrete
fossils of his home

You won´t believe it is lighter than
his fingers

You won´t believe
how it hovers
beneath the crumpled shelf
behind the stove
This is not cinnamon
This is not cloves
This does not belong
in the kitchen

You won´t believe
how a man in white in Fallujah
turns his face away in the picture
walks through crushed debris
of his own ceiling away from
a color darker than sienna
soil that buries
125 dead in a
sports field
outside his door

no it´s
more like rust
imprints on your palms
this splattered wall
of dried human
blood


II.

silence deceives
caresses you in full noon sun
its knuckles brush your cheek
just seconds before the sound of

bootsteps or scatter shot
walls collapsing beneath their weight
capture your breath
pummel your stomach
wrench your spine

here inside this kitchen
silence colors everything
its grey shadow mutes
the edges of the dinner table
the slate floor
and porcelain jars

I turn when he murmurs
the price he has paid in blood
but now he folds inward like a cloud
drifts away past a stain near the doorway
which he will not describe nor name

here I have no child´s eyes
to photograph in wide eloquence
no madrigal of open wounds
black scars violating geometry

only these linen robes
that whisper from stooped shoulders
only grief walking barefoot
into the next room


Maurisa Thompson

Posted over on The Pedestal Magazine