Three Poems By Benjamin Bartu
Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
The Bullets
Which came from the guns
Which were given to the soldiers
Who were enlisted in the army
For being born in a country
they didn’t resist.
Which were manufactured
By handsomely-paid companies
In places like New York
and Pennsylvania.
Which contained a lead-antimony alloy
Whose parts were mined in Missouri,
Alaska, Idaho, and Hunan before
Being encased in a soft brass
or steel jacket.
Which slid into the chamber,
Caring nothing for names,
Though their containers had names,
Names like Desert Eagle
And Jericho, name also
Of the oldest continually-inhabited
city on earth.
Which were fired from the wall
Demarcating the end
Of the Palestinian Territory:
The end of the Palestinian Territory
was under construction.
Which contained so much lead
That just one bullet from a .35-
Caliber handgun could contaminate
One day’s worth of drinking water
For the entire population of Salt Lake City,
Four times the size of Qalqilya, though
There was more than just one bullet,
were many,
Which riddled the earth they disappeared within,
In which they exchanged their earthly casings
For clouds of dust, from which man
Is said to have been made. Men are dust clouds
And the holes their bullets left
Made strange shapes, strange as the eyes
Of any odd angel, of any old fish.
John Berger in France Identifies the Absent Referent
In old age John Berger
who busied life looking
at Paintings Museums
cruelty to animals Waterlilies
began developing cataracts.
Proteins in his eyes broke
like Lincoln Town Cars into
their component parts.
Nor color nor detail
emerging quite as well.
He remembers hidings
again borne witness to.
His mother a woman
of fragmentary devotion.
He sees each sepal’s color
as through a dusty glass
he writes about when home.
He writes about the color
of the flower he used to write
about when home.
Double Dagger (An Annotated Relationship)
Monday morning, the house is cold —
the dog has been waiting in the sunroom for breakfast.
‡
They have been talking about themselves.
When she was younger, she says, she was meeker.
She liked to write, loved Sleater-Kinney. Something
inside her from which she yearned to be free.
She shared a bunk-bed with her sibling until leaving
home. Often felt anxious about taking up space.
She believes that the actions of people are attributable
half to who they are, and half to their environment.
She likes making ceramics and watching Blue Planet.
He believes the self cannot be parsed
from the environment,
which might mean believing the same thing as her.
When he was younger, he wanted to be capable of more
than he had the capacity to be capable of,
so more than once, he changed environments.
All he changed into was a man who must work very diligently
to remain self-satisfied.
He likes her ceramics.
‡
There’s a Light Beyond These Woods runs through the last Mary Margaret
on Youtube.
Night has fallen: he’s drinking in the living room,
designing a card for his friend’s twenty-seventh birthday
in Photoshop.
An advertisement for losing water weight
in six easy steps comes on,
and then A Case of You. Mitchell croons holy wine
and he remembers them,
the Gregorian chanters in the basement of the cathedral.
‡
We cannot remember everything at once,
so if he remembers them, the singers,
what must he leave out?
He cannot remember the putrid smell of the merchant town
sinking year by year beneath the waves.
He cannot remember the second verse of The Miller’s Son.
He cannot remember the name of his old black lab,
the one who wasn’t killed
but given away.
‡
He quits his part time job because his employer will not call for a ceasefire.
This does not make his employer call for a ceasefire.
‡
Seen through the window:
busy knitting her first cardigan.
Walrus mothers vying for melting ice floes
on the monitor.
Because of the sunroom,
sometimes she doesn’t hear
when he knocks.
Just one more stitch, he thinks, finger
on the doorbell,
her needle filling empty space
filled in by the thread.
‡
If all we have to show for is today,
the afterglow is only seconds old.
It enters the world accepting everything about itself.
Imagine a hand reaching out of a crib
toward something that isn’t there.
Practice holding air.
‡
A loaf of bread from the co-op,
sliced thick and toasted.
Butter for him, campari tomatoes,
salt, pepper, and feta spread light
across the open face. Between them,
those small sour pickles the French
call cornichons, which he has always associated
with romantic love, in a blue dish
she made by hand with leftover clay.
‡
And if the environment no longer resembles me?
‡
Her bed, at night —
asked did he love rain.
Yes.
She brought her hand back through the window
to smear across his chest.
About the Author
Benjamin Bartu is a poet & disability studies researcher. He is the author of the chapbook Myriad Reflector (2023), finalist for the Poetry Online Chapbook Contest. His poetry has been nominated for Best of the Net, and has appeared or is forthcoming in The Journal, Sonora Review, Bellingham Review, HAD, nat.brut, Guesthouse, & elsewhere. He lives in Oakland, California.