by Bonnie Naradzay
This is the island of wire pens.
The pens were built for men who fled
their Haitian shacks in leaking crafts
and rowed to the north in the endless sea.
But Coast Guard cruisers barred the way
and fished them out most cunningly,
and sent them to stew on the island of wire pens.
They broiled in the sun on the island in wire pens.
Then soldiers had them lie down flat
And shipped them back to Port au Prince.
These are Islamic renditioned men,
delivered all trussed up on planks,
that reside on this island of wire pens.
The Red Cross saw the ugly stalls
with concrete floors and manacles.
“These men need roofs for their wire pens.”
This is the home of styrofoam cups
where men contrive to write in codes
and live and die on the island of wire pens.
This is Jumah, robbed when he fled Afghanistan,
imprisoned, sold to soldiers bankrolled to buy
enemy combatants posing as friends.
This is the uniformed conscript
billeted in air-cooled Quonset huts
who gamely points out the basketball court
built for those who’ve signed
confessions and wear black hoods,
sequestered far from alien homes,
and die in codes on the island of wire pens.
Bonnie Naradzay is a graduate of the Stonecoast MFA program and has published poems in JAMA, SLAB, The Heartland Review, and numerous online publications.
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