Mine eye and heart are

–William Shakespeare, sonnet xlvi

I don’t know how to write

a poem about being Karelian.

There is no history.  When I was

near the Russian border, I tried

to do a search about Karelia

and got hacked.  I think of axes

and mass graves and history.

I think of absence, which is

hard to picture: nothingness.

I want to tell you about Karelia,

but there are no poems about

Karelia.  There are no Karelians

in those lack of poems.  I’ll look

at photos of the mass graves

online sometimes and find

they’re so hard to find.  They tell

me there are less than a thousand

people in the world with my last

name.  In the U.S., there are almost

three million people named Smith.

I have no children.  The V.A.

counselor told me my life expectancy

would only be about one more year,

but that’s only if I wasn’t going to

counseling.  She told me I have

nearly the same life expectancy

as everyone else with the counseling.

Why? I ask.  Guns, she says.  We

are quiet in the closet-y V.A. room.

I think of our two-word interaction.

Nothing makes sense in this world.

There are more than 5,000 buried

at Sandarmokh.  There are no poems

anywhere in the world about anything.