Backlit in D

At a red hot light

At a red hot light

a bang like a shrill vacuum

stampeded my father who

ceremonially

looked up through the blue in his windshield

at the small-town sky in anticipation for

death from above.

Instead a crying girl

apologized for the bumper

unaware

she drove the black carriage

that transplanted him back

to his mostly suppressed youth in a

monastery in Lebanon

where he’d buried the dead between bombings

because the other boys were too afraid of ghosts.

88

Maybe it wasn’t 88

but that’s how I always remember it.

88 Ashkars I will never meet

slaughtered under cars, in their homes.

30 years and 7,000 miles away I’m safe and

I couldn’t imagine losing 88 (or so).