Soldiers’ Chests

Newsweek, April 2, 2007

The young man smiling

in the picture displays

his torso like a target,

hard muscles over his heart

like armor, a small brown

bull’s-eye on each breast.

This is what you kill,

he could be saying,

if I don’t shoot you first.

He holds his rifle,

just in case.

“How do you live in a place

like this?” a new father

wrote from Baghdad.

“Being gentle

gets you killed.”

He was killed.

That spring he’d held

his newborn only son

and felt him rooting

on his chest the way

“a pig roots around

for truffles.”

It made him laugh,

the baby’s head bouncing

against him, mouth working,

ready to nurse.

“I’m smiling, even now,”

he wrote five days before

the armor-piercing blast.

“You were so determined,”

he told his child,

“and so alive.”