The Kabul airstrikes, the sandbagged checkpoints,

a boy crouching behind his mother’s skirt.

On the news, they say casualties like the word has no hands,

like the word has never held a body or brushed dust from a cheek.

The way a city learns to burn and burn and burn.

I think about the hands. I think about the men whose hands

dug through rubble for a child’s shoe, a rusted spoon,

something to prove life was there.

Outside, snow dissolves in the Hudson,

gray water swallowing yesterday’s trash, yesterday’s news.

On the news, they say displacement like the word has no house.

But I think about the houses.

Houses with bullet-pocked walls, stairwells caved in,

charred cribs still holding the shape of a child.

A woman kneeling in the wreckage of her kitchen,

sifting through broken plates, as if dinner might still be there.

A boy standing at the door of what was his school,

reading the blackened letters on the wall—

something about history, something about home.

Last week, a woman in the next room pressed the call button

until her knuckles turned white. She sobbed so loudly

the walls held their breath.

I was in the hallway when I heard her, a sound not unlike wind

funneling through broken windows. I hesitated, my hand

hovering over the doorframe, waiting—

for what? For her to call out? To say my name?

The nurse came in, checked her vitals,

offered her warm applesauce and a cup of water.

The woman opened her mouth, then closed it.

She wanted to say something.

But instead, she just looked at the cup.

And I thought, Yes. This.

Somewhere, a child is born in a war zone,

his first breath already lost to the wind.

Somewhere, a man wraps his wife’s body in a sheet

and carries her across a border.

Somewhere, a boy steps off a bus in a country

that does not want him.

I fold my hands in my lap. I touch the back of my hand.

I touch the side of my neck, just to make sure I am still here.

Everything is still here.

The IV machine hums. The radiator rattles.

Once, my father carried me across a flooded street in Xiamen.

I was six. The typhoon had swallowed the roads,

bicycles half-submerged, storefronts gaping with broken glass.

He said, Hold on. So I held on.