Author: Marguerite Bouvard
Location: Massachusetts

Marguerite Guzman Bouvard is the author of six books of poems, including the newly released The Unpredictability of Light, Word Press. She is also the author of ten nonfiction books on the topics of human rights, (political science), psychology, spirituality, and women's issues. Her poetry and essays have been widely anthologized. She has received fellowships from the Radcliffe Institute and the Wellesley Center for Research on Women, and grants for her poetry from the Puffin and the Danforth Foundations. She is a Resident Scholar at the Women Studies Research Center, Brandeis University.

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The Island Beyond Our Laws

Is where the light falls down
like a dead tree,
and night is a vulture
flapping its hungry wings,

where we strip off a name
with the person’s clothes;
the ailing grandfather,
the man who held his son on his lap,
the one who drank tea
with his family in the afternoon,
who had brothers and sisters
that loved him, a mother who waited
for him at dusk,

where death is kept at bay
and language flayed
on the runaway horse
of euphemisms;
“enhanced interrogations”
“stress techniques”
“no touch”
“self imposed pain,”

is where I hear my country howl
like a mad dog, its heart pulsing
in the barbed wire of fear,
its soul disappeared like the laws
we abandoned with such ease.

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