Christopher Leibow is a vagabond poet, and visual artist and a performer of small slights of hand. He is an MFA graduate of Antioch and has been published in numerous journals and online, including Juked, Interim, and Barrow Street and Cricket Online Review. His art has appeared in Lumina, 491 Magazine and has been a featured artist online with
Cha: A Journal of Asian Writing and OFZOOs. He is a two time Pushcart Award nominee and a Utah Book Award Nominee and the winner of the Writers@Work Writers Advocate Award in 2008. He currently lives in Salt Lake City, with his cat El Guapo.

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OF LOVE AND WAR
            Christopher Leibow

"Sometimes love is stronger than a man's convictions."
            - Isaac Bashevis Singer

*

There are wars and rumors of wars.
machineries and machination of

singular dark days
and singular dark clouds that hang

like props above our city.

We shut the window, we avoid their play.

Hungrily we take refuge between
each others' legs.

How comforting this is to us,
to love without armies or tanks

or generals of reasoned love.

*

From the narrow street, they can see us
wrestling with an angel -

the tugging of limbs and hair-
You speak low so they can’t hear

your seditious talk of love,
where my callused hands get tangled

in your low moaning - while I hold you down

to the bed,
                    my captive.

The occupation has begun —

your occupied body
            my undiminished country of so many
                                                            ardent prayers.

*

The soldiers are all leaving for the front.
Not us, we will stay

        and wage our war
                                of tenderness.

They are all leaving this morning.

Give them your applause for their sad
theater, and all their war ships
                                      and planes.

Soon

they will write letters home
which will arrive without them.

A few men will return,
        return gaunt; much less
than before
        with more sadness and less
dancing.

And when they do
   our war
        will have ended
        with a flag of white
                        bed sheets,

only a little blood,
            Victorious,
                 writing love letters on each others' bodies.

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