You can no more waterboard yourself

than sneak up on yourself at a party
where you suffer

hiccups like knives in your sternum.

A truth will remain inaccessible
behind the eye of the moon,

pain it takes a team of physicians

even to name. A robe of chemical
accelerant pools underfoot.

Men in suits & leather gloves assemble

an invisible plane through pantomime,
& their anonymous prisoners

come to believe their altitude is deadly.

Your burden of national insignificance
turns into a black star

installed in a hollow lobby. It has only
the one point:

you can complicate your relationship

with water only so much before the brother
you swam out with

admits he was not planning to return

W. M. Lobko’s poems, interviews, and reviews have appeared in journals such as Kenyon Review, The Paris-American, and Spinning Jenny; work is forthcoming from Boston Review. He has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and was a semi-finalist for the 92Y/Boston Review “Discovery” Prize. He studied at the University of Oregon, currently teaches in the New York City area, and serves as an editor of TUBA, a new quarterly review of poetry and art.