United States, (b. 1981)
Human Technology
- Sunlit and dangerous, this country road.
- We are follicle and meat and terror and
- the machines leave their shells naked on the ground.
- One soldier makes a museum in his basement.
- Each mannequin in brass, incombustible coats:
- I am walking between their blank faces,
- their bullets traveling at the speed of sound. One soldier
- who roasted a pig on his porch barbecuing until sinews were tender
- tells me he waited above the Euphrates and if they tried to pass
- even after we told them not to, they deserved it: pop (deserve it); pop
- (deserve it). Euphrates, your dark tunnel out is rippling around us.
- In the war, a child approaches a tank as one soldier counts the child’s
- steps. In the town, I drink a bottle of wine with that soldier
- among barber shops, boot repair shops. Is she my friend? I weep to her. I’ve lost
- who I thought I loved and she says I did
- this thing and to whom was that child beloved?
- Find common ground, the soldiers say. Humanize
- yourselves. Classify the norm of who you’re talking to, try
- to echo it. Do this for your country, says one soldier; we
- are sharks wearing suits of skin. Zip up.
- This spring, in the chilly, barely blooming city
- Solmaz says enough of this emptied word “empathy.”
- Ask for more: for rage. For love. On the porch,
- as the sun goes, the dark pools around us and one
- soldier says it is nightfall. I am tired. I did not mean for it to go on
- this long. That soldier across the table, we lock eyes.
- He tells me: in the occupied land we are the arm, they
- are the weapon. The weapon
- in this case is a person. Choose a person
- who knows who is bad. Make them
- slice open the skin of their country: only they can
- identify the enemy. Say yes or no: if a man squints while
- under the date palm; if a woman does not swing her arms
- while walking. Sir, my child was not with the enemy.
- He was with me in this kitchen, making lebna at home.
- The yogurt still is fresh on his wrist.
On the 4th of July in the Empire
- The soldiers, as a joke,
- bring a pig on the plane,
- to tandem-jump
- with one of the dudes.
- Bucking, manpig
- twists through air
- til pig won’t man can’t.
- Skin, socket, a tremble of teat.
- They tell me this in a bar
- right outside of these woods
- where old boys act-out
- a rape to teach war’s
- do’s and don’ts, slapping
- their hands together—
- are you in on this joke?
- Do you love your country,
- Gypsy? Drink up before
- the animal lands. To be
- a gypsy I want to say is to wander
- this world. I beg you, you there
- pinning the body to the wall.
About the Poet:
Nomi Stone, United States, (b. 1981), is a poet and an anthropologist. She has a PhD in Anthropology from Columbia and an MFA in Poetry from Warren Wilson College, Asheville, NC. Stone is currently an Assistant Professor in Poetry at the University of Texas, Dallas.
Stone is the author of two poetry collections, Stranger’s Notebook (TriQuarterly 2008) and Kill Class (2019). Her first anthropology monograph Pinelandia: Human Technology and American Empire/An Anthropology and Field-Poetics of Contemporary War is forthcoming in 2022.
Winner of a Pushcart Prize and a Fulbright, Stone’s poems appear recently in Guernica, Poetry Northwest, Drunken Boat, and Best American Poetry 2016, Plume, New Republic, New England Review, and elsewhere. [DES-04/22]
Additional information:
- Nomi Stone on Twitter – @Nomi_Stone
- Nomi Stone at University of Texas, Dallas