“Mazin bends his head to the table and cries.
His niece in Baghdad has been kidnapped.
She is twenty years old.
Masked men surrounded her and pulled her away
from her mother’s outstretched hands.
into a car. They were like a tsunami.
Iraq is a tsunami in slow motion.
I wake at night and wonder if she is alive
and if she is what her life is like.
To be in a cage of strange hands
Can only be a nightmare.”