by Jennifer Stewart Miller

The war criminal dreams he’s locked
in a windowless room with a hoard of mothers

The war criminal wakes up foaming
at the mouth from his own poisons

He can’t see properly—someone’s
blood keeps seeping into his eyes

He can’t go anywhere without dogs
slinking behind, lapping at his meaty scent

The war criminal insists on being his own lawyer
The prosecutor is his daughter

The war criminal heatedly denies his crimes—
murdered reporters nod and take detailed notes

He is sentenced to eat nothing but porridge made
of pulverized concrete and his own lies

His cronies find a better war criminal
and stop returning his calls

The war criminal sits on a busy corner
muttering about greatness and empire—

maybe on account of his maundering
and the way he seems to be turning

into the sidewalk, the war criminal
can’t catch anyone’s eye

Jennifer Stewart Miller’s book Thief (2021) won the 2020 Grayson Books Poetry Prize. She’s also the author of A Fox Appears: A Biography of a Boy in Haiku (2015), and The Strangers Burial Ground (Seven Kitchens Press 2020). Her poems have received Pushcart Prize nominations and appeared in Poet Lore, RHINO, Spillway, Sugar House Review, Tar River Poetry, Verse Daily, and many other journals. She holds an MFA from Bennington College and a JD from Columbia University.