III

Little comet with your father's eyes, Ezra-doll, small firefly with serious brow, may sleep find you with clean hands. May doors open like kind mouths. May the wind pronounce your name correctly. May no one teach you to be cruel. If dark dogs bay, may they sit, tail-thump, at the command of your calm voice. And when your father's scars speak in their sleep, may you know: he learned to carry storms so you could carry kites. Amen, habibi. Amen again.

Your smile breaks right where angels lose their nerve, a sweet, disobedient, off center thing. It tilts the room; the shadows reconverge. Your smile breaks right where angels lose their nerve. I press my thumbprint there, a little curve, and worlds remember how to mis-begin. Your smile breaks right where angels lose their nerve a sweet, disobedient, off center thing.

I vow to sharpen your laughter when it dulls, to oil the hinges of your careful joy. I vow to be the saint of small repairs, the witch who banishes mildew of despair. I vow to keep a kettle lit at four, a light at windows seven, nine, and twelve. I vow to learn your silences by heart, and answer each with matching, tender hush. By ribbon, ring, and rain, so let it be. By bread and blade and tea, I marry thee.

His smile bends wrong-ways A beautiful disaster, My favorite scar. Crooked like my thoughts, Like logic that makes sense at Three a.m. alone. When his lips curve left, Reality tilts gently Everything fits wrong-right.

You kept me safe, unknowing, back when I was small and you were a fighter, marching through my homeland's burning streets where children hid in cellars, praying to gods who'd gone selectively deaf. You didn't know that years later, you'd hold that war-child grown, that I'd find safety in the hands that held a rifle meant to kill my kind. How strange, how bittersweet, how curious.

They say you cannot love, my hollow man, That where a heart should beat there's only ice, That empathy is foreign to your soul, That you're a well-dressed monster in disguise, Incapable of feeling, cold as death But oh, how wrong they are, how small their truth. I know a different, deeper, darker truth: That you're no simple, sociopathic man, But something complicated, touched by death, By war, by trauma that transformed to ice The parts of you too wounded to disguise, Protection frozen round a burning soul. You feel, my love, perhaps too much, your soul Just learned to hide, to bury, because truth Is dangerous when enemies can't disguise Their tactics, when to be a feeling man Means dying, means you cannot be the ice Required to survive, to deal out death. So you became acquainted well with death, You learned to lock away your tender soul, To move through combat cold and sharp as ice, To make a weapon of yourself, the truth Is that you're more than most will understand, a man Who wears survival as his best disguise. But I see through the careful, crafted disguise, I see past the flirtation with death, I know you're not a monster but a man Who's guarded carefully his precious soul, And here's the beautiful and broken truth: You're melting now, my darling, all that ice. With me you thaw, with me you shed the ice, You drop, bit by bit, the disguise, You let me see the complicated truth, That you're not numb, not empty, not a death Machine, but rather: a living, breathing soul Who loves fiercely in the way a warrior-man Knows how, with loyalty like ice-made-diamond, With truth instead of pretty lies, with soul Deep devotion. My sociopathic man, you love like death: permanent.

You walked through my country when it burned, A young marine with orders and a gun, The sand and blood and lessons that you learned, Would shape the man you'd be when war was done. A young marine with orders and a gun, My homeland was your hell, your testing ground, Would shape the man you'd be when war was done, In deserts where the ghosts make no sound. My homeland was your hell, your testing ground, You killed and saved and survived the worst, In deserts where the ghosts make no sound, My country blessed you, cursed you, left you cursed. You killed and saved and survived the worst, Now hold the girl who fled what you fought through, My country blessed you, cursed you, left you cursed, But brought you here, to me, to something true. Now hold the girl who fled what you fought through, The sand and blood and lessons that you learned, But brought you here, to me, to something true, You walked through my country when it burned.

Before I was me, When I was just a someday, Just a possibility, Just a little girl-ghost in a war zone, You were there. Not there there, Not outside my specific door, But there, in the general sense, In the boots-on-ground sense, In the armed-American-in-Iraq sense. How strange and sick and beautiful That the same hands that held a rifle In my homeland, Will hold me. That the same eyes that scanned for threats Through my city streets, Now look at me with something soft (Or soft for you, which isn't soft at all, but close enough). You were the enemy, technically, The invader, the occupier, And I should hate you, perhaps, Should feel something righteous and angry, But instead I feel safe. Safe with the man who represents Everything that destroyed my homeland, Safe with the weapon-boy, The killer-man, The one who took orders To break the place I'm from. How fucked up is that, my love? How absolutely mad? (Perfect for me, then) You couldn't save Iraq, Couldn't stop the burning, Couldn't protect the little girl Who would grow up fractured, Who would flee, Who would find you. But you can save me now, Protect me now, Keep me safe now, And maybe that's a kind of redemption, Or maybe it's just irony, But either way, I'll take it. I'll take you, My accidental guardian, My unknowing protector, My American weapon-boy Who walked through fire So that years later I'd have someone who understands What burning feels like.

In dreams I drown in pools of absinthe green, Those eyes hold wars and wonders, cruel and keen. They've seen such horrors in the desert sand, Yet look at me so gentle, rare, serene. The color of poison, forest-deep, Of promises that hover in-between. When angry, they go cold as winter ice, When loving, they're the softest I have seen. I could get lost in that particular shade, Where danger and devotion convene. Oh Varvara, you fool, you mad girl, Those green eyes see your madness, still convene.