PoetryMagazine.com

David Allen Sullivan

USA

David Allen Sullivan teaches English and Film at Cabrillo Community College in Santa Cruz, California, where he edits the Porter Gulch Literary with his students, and serves on the Veterans Task Force Committee. Three poems from his first book, Strong-Armed Angels, were read on The Writer’s Almanac by Garrison Keillor. Another two recent poems were selected by Alberto Rios and recorded as part of the permanent public art and poetry project Passage, in Phoenix, Arizona. Bombs Have Not Breakfasted Yet is a collected of Adnan al-Sayegh’s poems he co-translated. He lives with the historian Cherie Barkey and their children, Jules and Amina Barivan. His website is: davidallensullivan.weebly.com. 

 

 

 

Night Visions
I stumble from sleep
to my nightmared child; scratch words
in my black journal
 
while the other hand
etches circles on her back.
In Iraq fires burn
 
that never go out.
Flares of night refineries
punctuate the sky,
 
suck the oxygen,
rip across kilometers
like constant thunder.
 
A father’s hand turns
sibha’s prayer beads, counts out
Allah’s ninety-nine
 
attributes; the other
inscribes overlaid zeros
on his daughter’s back.
 
Pleasure and sorrow
are bound together—wheat sheaves
awaiting threshing.
 
I’ve been too casual
about leaving, as if coming
back could be a choice.
 
Spirits have to leave
the body. I memorize
names, as if the sounds
 
might help me know them:
Tareq Ayoub, 34,
killed by the U.S.
 
bombing of Baghdad’s
Al-Jazeera main office;
Kfran Alaa Krem,
 
a four-year-old girl,
aircraft fire; Solomon Sam,
car bomb, 26;
 
Joshua Soto,
an Improvised Explosive
Device, 25;
 
Jen Cole, gunshot wound,
under investigation,
31 years old . . .
 
Someone draws circles
on my back inside my dreams
that keep widening.
                       
Who am I to write
these words? Who are you to turn
from these words and rest?

Poems reprinted from EVERY SEED A POMEGRANATE
from Tebot Bach Press.

 

 

 

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