The Devil Lives in Bucha

a poem

A while ago, I found myself sitting on a tired leather couch at my local auto body shop, waiting for an oil change.

As I sipped stale coffee and waited, I was forced to reckon with the massive TV on the wall and the news that it was blasting into the room. Reporters were covering a story on the Ukraine-Russia War, and on the screen was an up-close photo of Zelensky. I didn't hear a word the reporters said; I was so captivated by Zelensky's face that I felt myself fall into his eyes, his mouth, his grief. I took a picture of the screen and later, at home, I studied his face, trying to figure out why it haunted me so. This poem, which has never been published in print before, was born.

THE DEVIL LIVES IN BUCHA

The devil lives in Bucha.

I read that he said this, 
the morning after
I sat in the lounge
of an auto body shop,
sipping stale coffee
while the nice men
changed my oil. 

I don’t watch the news 
for just this reason:
I feel things I don’t want
to feel—the risings
of indignation
always just unrequited
chords, never met
with any notes
of conclusion.

But I was a captive audience
on that tired leather couch
[which groaned as if it too
carried the weight of the world].

///

The smooth constructs of reporting
rolled over my head as I leapt
from the high dive
of my pretend security;
I took on the shape of a 
clumsy prayer and plummeted
into the depths of his

shadowed pupils:

framed by folds 
of aged skin, pillowing out like 
dough—kneaded and kneaded by
worried hands until they’d held
their shape, overworked

his eyebrows:

knuckle of muscle knotted between them,
smacking of an arthritic finger
gnarled long
before its time

his forehead:

twin lines with parallel 
tracks, chugging east from Eden
and straight into Hell 

and his mouth: 

where I imagine there were days 
when that thin straight line
beneath his upper lip
parted in ecstasy—having just tasted
an excellent red or 
the surprised 
vocabulary 
of a well-timed joke—
but now it threatened to retreat, 
disappearing
altogether
into the concave motions
of grief. 

He said the devil’s
walking around this world
even as we do 
and I believe him
because he wouldn’t look like that

unless he’d seen him
in Bucha. 

///

A man his age
flipped me my keys,
said the oil was good to go.

That last sip of coffee
was full of grounds;
it hung bitter
in the back of my throat.