With love to Monica Berlin

about his worst memory he said he didn’t want to go back
twenty years—using his fingers to show how his heart
would explode into miniature fireworks.
The estimate comes down to six hundred missing,
the estimate comes to a son flying off a bridge.
In one interview, another man tells me what he lost—
an unborn first child, his father. He,
in an attempt to be brief, lists all the people in a war
who died from normal things: a stroke, an accident, sadness.

Note: This poem is part of a series based on interviews with survivors and refugees of the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait.