Much like his grandson’s toy, the Russian army 
swiftly re-assembles itself
first in Belarus, then Donetsk, and Crimea 
with blood banks, field hospitals, mess tents, 
and mysterious HQs marked by geodesic domes, 
dark inside where the orders arrive, 
mistaken for Tarot and silently obeyed—
this the way the tumor surrounds my friend’s esophagus
from many staging points in his throat and abdomen—
the thyroid, the intestines, the nether regions
no one would willingly travel in conditions like these. 

This is where the rages we never got to speak have gathered,
and who can blame us given the awfulness
we have banked inside?
It strangles so that we can’t eat
and no longer think of eating.
We wait out the wreckage the body can do to itself
in some subterranean station
decorated in hues of another century 
that our daughters and grandsons could never imagine.
And into this come the healers, charged with excising ills 
as our insides get chewed once more this morning 
through a port, this hole dug in our soul,
meant to make us a new life—
here, or, perhaps, in the now dreamed of other side.