☀ Today's Poem: "The Inheritance of Intelligence" Caitlin Roach

It was just point and click.

— Brandon Bryant, former U.S. drone operator

When I said the doe I meant
the people. When I said the buck I meant
they're coming for our throats.
When she stopped running the buck heard permit
when all she meant is I give up.
Not an offering but surrender.
So much is lost in translation or else just
overlooked. In a free Arabic course
offered by an institution of higher education
dubbed a feeder for Agency
the instructor misspoke: there are tanks
coming in translated as an onset of fog
is approaching. It doesn't have to be exact
just near. Ten thousand miles away
in a chair at a screen in a box wait can be read
as fire. Before any strike is taken Barack Obama
there must be near certainty that no civilians
will be killed as the law bends to fit
what it must, so a signature—not bound
to identity but merely a fitting-into
what at least one deems a sketch looking
something like terror. Blots
bleeding in disordered procession,
moving nothing like the ant's measured turn
at each step, are taken down in tens
it is the highest standard we can set— Barack Obama
did I say tens? I mean ten
times that. What we deem room
for error. What we deem near.
The people are told
the people are at threat
and they believe it. Each time I turn to look
out the window I’m tricked into thinking
the light at the tip of the wing on the plane
is a moon, and on the topic of skies,
so determined is the fate of a star by its mass.
Small ones live long and die quiet deaths
like the red dwarfs that shine feebly
for trillions of years before collapsing in
to a white one. Right now, tomorrow, in Egypt John. O. Brennan
I took the body of a man named Mohamed whose hand
drew from me what it wanted, what I let it,
a long arm fished for market figs in a pail
even before a throat spoke. We turned
in red blooms at the shore that kept
the sons of Jacob I was told and all that
telling had me roused to be blessed
by a hand heir to some holiness.
I never wanted the hand, the inheritance
it held, but had not a body
to refuse it. What happened with the Arab Spring, that wave John. O. Brennan
of instability that swept across the Middle East,
started with a Tunisian fruit salesman
who self-immolated after police confiscated
for no reason but torment his cart
holding the two hundred dollars’
worth of fruit he contracted in debt
the day before to keep carrying his mother
and uncle and siblings on the one hundred
forty U.S. dollars he made per month
selling produce on the streets of Sidi Bouzid.
Early that day in the middle of December
his decade-long struggle to survive finally
collapsed when he hadn’t the money
to bribe them. An hour later, in the middle
of traffic, outside where the governor sat
refusing to hear his complaint, he went
to a nearby station, filled a can with gasoline,
returned to the street, and shouted
how do you expect me to make a living? Mohamed Bouazizi
then set himself alight with a match
and last night in America
another mosque was set ablaze. That was the spark John. O. Brennan
that set off the forest fire. In the forest, the doe freezes
in fear when she is spotted in the scope.
Identities are caused by performative actions
the actor and audience form
together, thus the hunter cannot be so
without the doe. Without her
he becomes what. No, not becomes,
is. Is another body in the field. I mean
the ground. The tricks the eyes will do.We react
towhat we believe to be the facts. In the forest John. O. Brennan
a doe’s bellowing flushes a buck from the fog
into the clearing to cross to her. With near
certainty it is her and not the mouth of a man
calling her, he acts. Point and click. Intelligence Vicki Divoll
isn’t evidence, anyone who’s worked in intelligence
knows that. The branches of fire coral
grow how they must to minimize
their exposure to waves. The yellowtail
damselfish dwells in its arms and retreats
to its heat when threatened, as its onset of
fog approaches. Don’t you know
the will to ward off is never enough, nor
the ward itself. One must strike before
will to ward is born, before the body
becomes, before it moves toward, umbilical
to the sovereign. Said the agent.
What kind of repression do you think it takes sister of Mohamed Bouazizi
for a young man to do this? I do not need to know
God to know these men would wring
the small necks of children if they stood
on what they lusted.

The man never named him. Never called him
Mohamed, never so much as neared
what brought him to die. Just sat in his chair
on the stage, flashing his teeth to the people
charmed by his hunger, the people becoming
the people who sit in a chair at a screen
in a box in a desert like this one.

Not fruit. Meat yanked fresh
from a mollusk and dangling
at a wet beak. Not streets, a wellspring.
Not a salesman, a godwit. The fog lifts.
You're cleared hot. The safety observer permission to strike
stands behind a pair of shoulders, counting
down to zero from ten, then shouts SPLASH
when the dark collapses into light.