I watched my mother
read a book about it poolside,
her towel dripping now and then
on the aqua tiles.

We had heard about it all our lives — a network of pain,
flat, cold, decolored; mobs of grey men
sucking at cold soup and cigarettes,
watching each other’s mouths for scraps.

We imagined that they
were just like us, more like us
than they were like their countrymen.
We suspected they were our story on ice,

believed that so hard that it hardly mattered
if that was true. They were a slice
of the red white and blue. Freedom
was always an American word back then.

When we were older and prisoners
began to emerge from the gulag
with stories of how it truly had been
we were shocked to learn we’d been close to

right, but still so far from truth. We got a taste
for spreadsheets and close notation. We understood
that some of those people were scum
and not heroes, and heroes

and scum were sometimes so blended
they didn’t even know who was who.
No one reads their books by poolside now;
some myths are made to be remembered in error.

Each day we wake to news
of new islands we’ve filled
with dangerous men. We’re now the ones
punching the clocks and typing the stats.

Honestly, we don’t know who’s sitting there, sweating
out the days in boxes, staring
at the mouths of comrades. Some are terrible
potentialities, some long for their fields and children,

some are all at once a terror and a caution
to us. We punch the names and strike
the boxes. Someone’s going to write about this
someday, and someone’s mother

may read the book by poolside again, taking in another slice
of the red white and blue, but not now. Now
the oceans and the trees are flat and grey to the easy viewer,
and while fewer are smoking, the new soup is still cold on the tongue.