Postwar

All night the phone rang.
Bread loaves aped gravestones.

When he found poems written in blood, he could only scream them.
No musician knew how to carry weight.

But always, always the memory of that sweater
falling off her shoulder. Like it or not,

she was an icon, a postage stamp. The sweat
on her chest, the friendliness of her hands

patting an usher's back in a bombed theater… Valentines
hung on every tree, replacing the decomposed executed.

It was hard not to think of yourself as a ghost—
still, somehow love continued to tighten its biceps.

He drank a milkshake made of ground-up doors.
How quickly the fog moved in.

--Anton Yakovlev