American Sonnet Upon Finding an Old Report Card

In all the times and places I have failed to thrive.
Words surrounded me, spilling from pockets, pooling
at my feet. I have never been a runner. I like the moon
to stay in place. School taught us cycle of violence,
cycle of poverty. Cycles natural as rain or carbon —
unstoppable. The Things They Carried. Things men carry.
What do I carry but a question mark on my back?
My toenails churned the dirt, searching for Earth’s weak spots:
places to root. Reading, I learned words like windsor, alabaster,
spleen. In my spleen grew a garden I kept secret.
Here I am, still barefoot, silver blooming from my scalp.
In the forest, I go searching for the sparrow who stole my key.
I find an egg, look inside: a whale, crouching for survival.
The ocean waves. See, a mouth large enough to hold you.

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American Sonnet Whenever [Gaza/Afghanistan/Vietnam/etc.] Gets Called a
Land of Bombs

After someone detonates enough bombs on your land,
it becomes a land of bombs. As if bombs grow on your trees,
erupting like berries from remains of petals. Or slough off
your skin like cells; swim upstream in your blood
like salmon. Bombs, your habitat. Bombs, your ecosystem.
Bombs, the leaf crumbling in your hair. Their fuel, the lichen
crawling up your limbs. Their casings, your molted shells.
Unexploded ordnance, the natural consequence of you.
A little boy with no legs shows up on a commercial,
and nobody says where the bombs came from. Nobody says
what color the bomb factory was, on whose land it stood.
From whom that land was stolen; water generating power
for the factory, stolen. The boy is just there, an orphan
plucked from the land of bombs. Possibly, a bomb himself.