after Hanif Abdurraqib

& the man on television calls it unfortunate yet inevitable collateral damage & i wonder what it is that turns mourning into a metonym or a proclamation of conjecture & i read his bio & see that he has a wife & i can't imagine he would call it inevitable if her body were pulled from the quiet implosion of scattered rubble & i see that he has a son & i can’t imagine he would call the boy who bears his name collateral in someone else's war & i see that he has a daughter & i think of what it might mean for someone to render her final breath an inescapable reality of global politics & i understand what he means i know he means that war is callous & unforgiving that a militant can surround himself with a dozen women & children so that the pilot must decide between a target & the soft ache of his own heart's detonation i do not misunderstand the cruelty of war but i regret the way we talk about its casualties how their lives become tacit admonitions how the tyranny of a border made out of thin air means that bombs are only dropped on one side of it but i too have felt the empathy corrode inside the most cavernous parts of me have taken the quarters from my pocket & used them to cover my collusion who among us has not used spare change to ornament our contrition laid a garland of rations atop the bodies of names we do not know & i’m not sure what it means for us not to be the one to fire the bullet but to behave as if the bullet always belonged in that chest & not our own