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A small domestic war poem in which worry for a husband collapses private love and the public violence named by 'IRAQ.'

The page is powerful because it does almost nothing rhetorically. Fear enters the marriage in blunt fragments, and the final country name makes clear that the threat is geopolitical as well as intimate.

Titled 'LOVE', the poem speaks in a borrowed voice - a wife's. The broken syntax, 'It is not Life / My husband / to be afraid', wavers between telling a husband not to fear and admitting the fear is hers. The plain confession 'But I Am worried / that he is' carries the whole weight, and then the single word 'IRAQ' set apart on the last line snaps the private dread into a public war. The page does almost nothing rhetorically; it just chooses its final word, and the choice locates the marriage inside a specific, named danger.