Directions: Read the excerpt and answer questions 1 through 5.
Excerpt from Bag of Bones by Dunya Mikhail
The skull is also in the bag
in all other trembling hands.
His bones, like thousands of bones
his skull, not like any other skull.
with which he listened to music
that never knew clean air,
15 a mouth, open like a chasm,
was not like that when he kissed her
noisy with skulls and bones and dust
20 dug up with questions:
What does it mean to die all this death
in a place where the darkness plays all this silence?
What does it mean to meet your loved ones now
with all of these hollow places?
25 To give back to your mother
on the occasion of birth?
30 To depart without death or birth certificates
because the dictator does not give receipts
The dictator has a heart, too,
a balloon that never pops.
35 He has a skull, too, a huge one
not like any other skull.
It solved by itself a math problem
That multiplied the one death by millions
40 The dictator is the director of a great tragedy.
until the bones begin to rattle—
45 the full bag finally in her hand,
unlike her disappointed neighbor
who has not yet found her own.
Dunya Mikhail (b. 1965) is an Iraqi American poet who was born and raised in Iraq. As a journalist and poet in Baghdad, her writing was considered “subversive” by former dictator Saddam Hussein. Mikhail was placed on Hussein’s enemies list and fled to the United States in 1996 following threats and harassment from the government. After the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, many mass graves were found, believed to be from Hussein’s 20 years in power.