Page 58
By Jack Joseph Smith
Love
It is not Life
My husband
to be afraid
But I am worried
that he is
IRAQ
By Jack Joseph Smith
Original Scan
AI Interpretation
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.
'Love / It is not Life / My husband / to be afraid' — the speaker is borrowed, a wife. Then 'IRAQ' alone on the last line, dating the poem and closing it. The page does almost nothing but choose its final word, and that is enough.