Deniability


A leak implies without affirming fact;
there’s wiggle room should details contradict,
events reverse themselves, a photograph
prove forged. Whose grasp of evidence is firm
enough to verify its chain, each link
unblemished by the bottom muck of time?
Consider your child’s birth certificate,
Mom’s recipes, amendments to your will—
if you’ve lost these then how’s intelligence
know missile shed from shadow, extract sense
from cellphone intercepts where coded threat’s
expressed as wedding plans? Network anchors
bargain ratings higher, negotiate
for access to exclusive video.

Officials fashion lullaby from lie,
commitment into exit strategy
conveyed in semaphore, averted eyes
a silent language undercutting words.
Truth’s relative as beauty, circumstance
our ever-shifting standard, as an urn’s
exhumed pastoral darkens to reveal
a priest receiving sacrificial girls
with oil and fire, their moistened limbs consigned
to greater good, the glaze that purifies.
You turn it, passerby, obliged to none,
witness without testimony, faint sough
of bone and ash inside this artifact
the only evidence you can’t deny.

The Third Pig


Anyone can smell it coming,
rank meaty breath and ticking claws.
Hindsight’s so enhanced prescience
you apprehend the end before
due credit’s claimed or blame assigned
to splinter groups as yet unnamed.
Warned, you make escape provisions,
hoard water and electric tape,
surf uninterrupted broadcasts,
test batteries and buy a gun.
Car alarm crescendos summon
first responders, rotors hammer
telegraphic reassurance—
got it got it got it got it—
but something’s up, the anchorman
makes semaphores of frowns and grins
that contradict his scripted news,
agenda none but you discerns.
Each day’s a cautionary tale
you listen to, a child again,
mesmerized by Dad exclaiming
Wolf! to villagers once-bitten
into doubt, Chicken Little’s squawks
against the imminent collapse,
the mine canary whistling one
inquiring note into the dark,
then pausing to inhale, and wait.

Likenesses


The specialist displayed his handiwork:
before and after photographs of kids
disfigured by genetic quirk—
ears clenched buds, noses incomplete—fitted
with prosthetics. He’d designed disguises
for CIA-led foreign escapades,
transfigured diplomats and spies
who fled their veils, identities unmade.
His pages turned to war’s portfolio,
the burned, bombed, slashed to ribbons, branded, shot,
someone’s children made to swallow
our proclivities, merciful or not.
"So much of who we are," he said, "depends
on markers humans recognize as us."
I recalled our daughter Helen
shying from my stroke-strange mother’s kisses,
two years enough to discern alien
in familiar guise. Random casualties
of fragile chromosome or gun,
invention or divine efficiency,
can children fathom what we have in mind—
reconstructed in our broken image,
comforting likenesses, our kind,
ours to crush again and kiss the damage?