war-child never stopped shaking,
thought her eyes were exit wounds,
thought her voice sounded
like shell casings clinking in the bunkers
like pennies on the sidewalk
like wishes in the well.

she was a penny on the sidewalk, some shiny
piece of luck picked up searching for peace
in the ruins of london. a man and a woman found shelter
in the ruins of london
in the embers they raked from rubble and
breathed life into, whispering to each other, calling them
fireworks for v-day
and they kept the fires in their fingers because
fireworks in the sky sounded too much like bombs
dropping.

war-child shakes like bombs, echoes like fireworks, lights up the sky
and disappears.
war-child has bones like decaying cathedrals in france,
lips like shattered stain glass.
war-child has ash on her tongue,
the names of people she will never meet.

war-child's peace was not lasting.

war-child lost her name tag over the atlantic, never
looked back for her language.
she covers europe's burns with grafts
of cleaner deaths, scars like silver linings, last words whispering
like wisconsin. what word whispers like wisconsin?
no german, no blitzkrieg, no lightning splitting
a tree into charcoal.

war-child lives above a funeral home, planning
parties for corpses
white like her eyes
grey like ash on her tongue.
in their quiet she can almost
fall asleep
without triggering the gunpowder dreams
that turn her breath to smoke. so she breathes
in dreamless dark and thinks
this is what it must be like to
fall in love:
quiet and cold and colorless.

war-child opens her heart like berlin
lets the boys in to
build up walls
tear at walls
paint on walls
and when she tastes decay in their mouths
she calls it love

and love rips inside of her like a mortar shell

war-child is a cathedral no one prays in,
so she prays alone
with words like bullets rolling
between shattered stones
lost in the ash white as her skin,
in blue shadows
of veins and arteries in the shape
of cinder bodies, cinder girls, the cinders
that fell on them like snow.
and when she closes her eyes,
she asks God if she will bleed in color
or if all the red has already left her body.

she thinks God has answered when love grows red
in her cinder skin
in her cinder skin beating
with thunder and pulsing light

war-child's lips shake
when she tries to make a name
for a person she hasn't met yet.

war-child's fingers shake
when she tries to show them the shape
of light in her.

war-child shakes
when she decides
love looks like an entrance wound.

war-child shakes
when she prays,

and she looks like light through a cracked
stained glass window, every speck of dust
from a broken city brought into focus.
she thought she could hear God breathing
in the blanks her throat fired.

when love hits her,
war-child sees stars.
when love hits her,
war-child stops mistaking stars
for falling bombs.
when love hits her,
it rips her chest open.

and in her blood is her language,
beating heart sounds she didn't know
existed in the empty arches of her ribs,
beating heart sounds that clear the dust.

war-child shakes when the bleeding stops,
whispers words like wisconsin,
the names of people she met when she was young,
prayers that aren't alone anymore.

war-child remembers how to breathe
when they rebuild the cathedrals.

war-child finds her peace
in the sound of hearts, thinks
this is what falling in love is like:
loud and warm and growing.

war-child remembers how to breathe
when her son shows her,
and she thought his eyes were stars,
thought his voice sounded
like bells in the morning
like pennies on the sidewalk
like wishes in the well.

war-child never stopped shaking,
and she echoes,
echoes,
echoes,