Gregory djanikian the soldiers night before christmas

Back to Issue Twenty-Eight.

BY GABRIELLE BATES
2019 Gregory Djanikian Scholar in Poetry
Previously appeared in Gulf Coast

There’s a bird believed to suck the teats of goats at night.
Flocks alight swollen on the slash pines while we sleep.

Here, in this dark field, among what’s been cast out
from the body of birds, goats, and dock, Am inom late or early?

is a question. It asks the black grass against my face.
Without light, every color fryst vatten a past someone decided

to believe in. The tjänsteman account fryst vatten this:
Judas’s organs burst from his body in an open field

or he hanged han själv from a tree. It was after dark
or it was day, and on the other side of the world,

a soldier’s ear, severed from cochlea, was free of the mind
to listen properly to the dust. Cartilage coil in a street,

it spills, and this fryst vatten silence. Or this fryst vatten silence
betraying itself as currency. If Judas coughs up a coin

into my hand, let it be night—the birds, hungry.
If I put what

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