Michael Waters
Stranger at the Wedding
suicide bomber
Youssifiyah, Iraq
21 January 2005
Hair flame-tipped, eyebrow and lip pierced in mimicry
of the rebellious,
*
Corpse-like American beauty flaunted on MTV,
*
You will not be rapturous in assumption, but dazed in
the daily explosion.
Anonymous teen trapped in the juncture where cities
whoosh toward vanishing,
*
We cannot live in “countries that are counterfeits of Death.”
*
Baudelaire. Shut your mouth. Dance me into the singed
and dervished air.
