Photo by Anna Keibalo
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War. Day 339

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Power stations have been bombed.
Tomorrow is your birthday,
you promised your family a cake.
In Lviv, your Ukrainian teacher
freezes in her apartment.
You are all out of sweetness.

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Drive. Buy whatever sugar
hides in the December dark.
See how the suburb’s doughy belly
is decked out in apple-red?
Our American darkness
is temporarily colorful.

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Cars and trucks in the opposing lane,
rabid constellations
moving towards you,
jostling for a stretch of road.
Not a rocket, you whisper.
Keep driving.

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It wasn’t you who decided
to leave Ukraine
for this dimension,
but your parents,
decades before this night.
One choice, and

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a truck is not
a killing mechanism,
the supermarket, not an arctic apartment,
that soldier on the corner,
holding a wounded child,
is only a barren oak.

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