At My Niece’s Birthday Party, 1,431 Miles North of Guantánamo – Michigan Quarterly Review

At My Niece’s Birthday Party, 1,431 Miles North of Guantánamo

Fall 2022 | Jonathan Greenhause Reads "At my niece’s birthday party, 1,431 miles north of Guantánamo” MQR Sound

Jonathan Greenhause reads his poem "At my niece’s birthday party, 1,431 miles north of Guantánamo”, for MQR's Fall 2022 special issue 'Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink'.
six-year-olds play “Tape the Heart on the Tin-Man,” red cardboard
held out to a concrete wall.  They’re blindfolded
but unbruised, protective parents
gathering close behind, whispering about waterboarding
& imperialism’s risks, the possibilities
one day these kids might do the blindfolding.  Gretchen
slaps her ripped heart
upon the gray space destined for it, a blood-red forest blooming
upon our shackled prisoner on this spackled wall,
while Madison’s mucus-spotted sleeve
sticks to her flimsy organ, her aim
pathetically off target.  My sister lends a hand, leads her closer
to the tape-ravaged Tin-Man; & my niece, dressed as Dorothy,
skips down a plastic yellow-brick road
with classmates who’ll be shaped by – & may offer to shape –
a country warring with itself.  A round of applause erupts,
& the afternoon drags on
in a blur of glitter & chalk, of layer cake & the Hokey Pokey,
of pizza & coke; while 1,431 miles to the south,
a father curls into the fetal position,
can’t recall his children’s faces, repeatedly pleads to go back home.

Why I Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review Contributing Editor Urvi Kumbhat on why she recommended “At My Niece’s Birthday Party, 1,431 Miles North of Guantánamo” by Jonathan Greenhause for our Fall 2022 issue. You can purchase the issue here.

Jonathan Greenhause’s poem “At My Niece’s Birthday Party, 1,431 Miles North of Guantánamo” disallows the ease of distance. The poem reminds us at every turn— even before it begins— that the perimetered violence of prison leaks, warps, bloodies. Two presidents have promised to close the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, established during the so-called War on Terror, site of widely documented human rights abuse, bolstered by the racist word games of danger and terrorism. The prison remains open.

The poem begins with the playful image of children playing a party game, and yet the “concrete wall” recalls that other place we’d rather forget. The parents here are astute, anxious, know already that life in the imperial core is always already haunted. That violence begets violence. Who will their children become? To the speaker, the Tin-Man on the wall is both the children’s delight and a kind of rehearsal— “a blood-red forest blooming/ upon our shackled prisoner.”

This is not a poem about the cost of innocence, or one of innocence vs. guilt. At the poem’s end, we encounter an imprisoned father curled into “fetal position”— the word “fetal” recalling the child he once was. While the parents at the party worry abstractly, the father’s desires are immediate, desperate, rooted in love. The past, present, and future inhabit each other all at once— the nation redrawing its borders all over the world, children born into its violence, struggles for justice stretched across decades. In the poem’s wavering but contained form, geographies and histories click in and out of view, refusing to parcel away what is brutally fenced off from the trappings of everyday America.

At the poem’s center, when Madison misses the target, it comes as a relief. The poem lets out a breath. At its margins, another way.


For more from the Fall 2022 special issue of MQR, “Fractured Union: American Democracy on the Brink,” you can purchase the issue here.

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