I was collecting cans in the Kroger parking lot
when I saw a group of hawks getting dressed
in the skins of soldiers. The skins fit them
poorly, their blond beards tattered and crawling
with bugs. With new, pale fingers, they played
with their zip ties sized for a grandmother’s wrists.
Country music spilled from the open door
of a van left running, and the hawks sang along,
shaky at first, but after the chorus came around
a second time, I could hardly tell that they weren’t
men singing. The street was empty. The world
looked like someone had turned it on its side
and shaken it out, like shaking spiders out
of an old shoe. I’ve seen it before, a hundred
times. A twitch of a tsar’s mustache, and there go
a dozen shtetls, up in flames. Back then,
young men would come to my hut in the woods,
begging. Grandmother, teach me how to fight.
‍Maybe an evil wizard had stolen their beloved.
Maybe some Cossacks cut their little brothers
in half. I said, Do you see the skulls that decorate
the fence around my hut? The killing is easy.
I gave them tea with a spoonful of jam dark
as clotted blood. I let them sleep one more night
as boys, and before they woke, I turned them
into frogs and hid them in the grass along the road,
so whenever the Cossacks rode by at night, sabers
glinting, the frogs sang a chorus of insults
that made even the cavalry horses laugh.