Water Cooler & Vultures
by Adnan Adam Onart
Vultures
Just to get started,
I place a boy, face powdered in dust,
in front of a dilapidated building
walls covered with graffiti in Arabic
so that he relieves himself peacefully
pushing forward his abdomen
swollen from hunger.
Not very far away from him,
but in a separate stanza,
I lay three headless corpses
next to their severed heads
with terrified eyes gouged out
in a town square completely deserted.
I am the bearded one in the flock; the other two are of the bald kind.
First dives
the one, who made his fortune
selling oil in the blackmarket.
Then the other,
an expert in money laundering
to purchase tanks, humvees,
heavy machinery with a nifty 40% kick-back.
I soar – two big circles.
This is going to be a fantastic poem,
I buzz with rapaciousness,
before entrusting myself
to what you call “gravity.”
Water Cooler
Let’s just nuke them, he says
—a software engineer with an advanced degree
from California Institute of Technology,
let’s erase Baghdad from the face of the earth,
tapping his bony fingers
on the water cooler
as if it were the head of a bomb.
The whole group laughs.
A nine-year-old replies
—in a demonstration in Istanbul,
talking to TV reporters
sober as if the future of the Iraqi nation
depended on him:
War kills children.
He points to a picture he holds:
a group of boys and girls
playing hide-and-seek
among the ruins
of some demolished buildings.
These kids are my brothers and sisters.
I don’t want them to die.
Despite all kinds of noises
—men shouting slogans,
cars honking,
police banging their clubs
on their Plexiglas shields—
a terrible silence surrounds him.
Nobody laughs.
Adnan Adam Onart lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colere Magazine, Red Wheel Barrow, The Massachusetts Review, among others. His first poetry collection, The Passport You Asked For, has been published by The Aeolos Press, together with Kenneth Rosen’s Cyprus’ Bad Period. He was awarded an honorable mention in the 2007 New England Poetry Club Erika Mumford Award. He is one of the winners of the 2011 Nazim Hikmet Poetry Competition. International Poetry Review published a translation he made together with Victor Howes from Edip Cansever, a Turkish contemporary poet.
About his two poems in Collateral, Onart writes, “These two poems were written in reaction to the events surrounding two recent wars in the Middle East. ‘Water Cooler’ was written in association with the invasion of Iraq and the protests it generated around the world. ‘Vultures’ was triggered by the civil war that has been taking place in Syria, and many forms of profiteering it generated in that geography. But the poem tries to highlight the paradox: even writing a poem about war is a form of making a profit from it.”