You can see right though that dress.

A filmy peach like candle wax, but 

loose, but shiny, like a glazed donut. 

And everything behind the dress 

appears just as pale also with a gleam. 

I have had the dress a very long time 

but have only worn it once. The occasion

now forgotten because in that dress I am 

absorbed with me and with the dress. Distracted 

completely by the feeling of being hidden but also 

being visible--but softly visible. Pencilled in.

If I crossed my leg, you might have thought 

something under the dress was winged 

and had just fluttered. 

Everyday movements all seemed grander,

evoked a desert wind. 

In the dress, I became a phantom, a past self

climbing steps to a platform to accept 

a crown or an award or something else 

extraordinary. 

Memorial day

Crumpled. Their young bodies

so taken by force.

Damp like at birth. 

Soft flesh gleams from womb water then,

from melted metal now where

here they lie in a field of grass 

         on the backs of wild celery.

Here no questions.

But say it, they were murdered 

though we who murder them call it other things.

We call it "fallen".

No matter, they are our very own fallen dead

and we who sent them to Iraq want them back.

We want them back and in the center 

of each caved chest we place a rose, 

one stem in each

of our fallen boys and girls.

And then look.  The whole field glows 

a pious red.

As if there were only one rose,

only one dead.

Only one dead.