Improv, Week 3

*excerpt*

Camouflaging the Chimera
-Yusef Komunyakaa

We tied branches to our helmets.
We painted our faces & rifles
with mud from a riverbank,

blades of grass hung from the pockets
of our tiger suits. We wove
ourselves into the terrain,
content to be a hummingbird's target.

We hugged bamboo & leaned
against a breeze off the river,
slow-dragging with ghosts

from Saigon to Bangkok,
with women left in doorways
marching in from America.


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Women left grass, painted in mud,
hung in the doorways. Hummingbirds
zipped in range of the wet green

smell and licked the dirt to find
it tasted of refuge. Women tied
tigers' tails to children's wrists

for luck. The body of the tiger
was sent to America, cut and crammed
into a freezer bin then boated

across the sea. Americans salivated
for the body, the rust-color fur,
the black padded paws. The eye

for a necklace, the teeth for a pin.
Women wear coats made of tiger skin
to camouflage thier own paleness
and the river of bones they live in.