Ouroboros

We were inconvenient dots
on the ethnographic map.
Starving they marched us across
Deir-ez-Zor’s scorching sand,
clawing through grit and granule
for morsel or scrap.
They called us strangers
in our own country—

starving they marched us
through frozen Polish fields,
we who walked on ground
littered with bones and ash,
going from camp to camp,
searching for lost kin,
vowing, like a prayer,
“Never again”—

hiding amongst the ash and
burned-out bones of trees,
we fled Khmer Rouge and
skin-searing Agent Orange.
As usual the world watched hate rampage,
the days passed, all unseized, leaving us
our trauma and our scars—

men in faded Yugoslav camos surround us,
they reach for our bodies voraciously
like a cutpurse snatches a brooch,
and pass us around, roughly,
until the spaces past our
bodies feel like scars.
Afterwards they load us (the living,
for later) in an unmarked coach—

the radio crackles and hisses,
and at last the clock broaches
the question of “when?” Now’s
the time for knives out, to tap
our machetes on the skulls
of all known cockroaches
crawling, unwanted dots,
on the ethnographic map.