Kathleen E. Casey

Bashar al-Assad: The Sand Refuses To Speak Your Name

It is impossible to fully fathom the extent of the devastation in Syria, but its people
have endured some of the greatest crimes the world has witnessed this century...
[it] ­­remains a living nightmare.—UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres 

The skies spitting bombs.
Starvation.
Burials.
______________________
These are the things you know.— Khalid Hosseini, Sea Prayer

Night gash
skulls cracked
the sound
of stars beating
stone
snow lashing
ground
cold it
is howl
found
a long
march
it is desert
day crushed
to grit
lung
it is
drowned
into seas called
suffering it
is blood
rupture 
tentacles
flaying skin
the way your
Saturn mouth
devours
earth
your slanted
chin      it
             is
vultures
feasting
blood-
shot eye ribs
split in
your reckless
teeth
that reek
of human bone
the sting of ice
it is
tongues
anesthetized
in sleet
starvation verbs
skin chewed
inside a slit
the cold
crumpled into
shrouds
it is
a whetted moan
a headless house
gasping views
your neck
ripened for
the noose
it
is—

what gods give
you leave
to pleasure
yourself
in slaughter?

Kathleen E. Casey is a visual artist and poet living nervously beneath several slumbering volcanoes. She holds a degree in fine art and is the recipient of awards for her photography, illustration and graphic design. Her work has appeared in Funicular Magazine, Hoxie Gorge Review, Jet Fuel Review, Oracle Bone, Poached Hare, Projector Literary Magazine, Poets Reading the News, Rhino Poetry, and Zooetic Press.