Challenging is an understatement.  Beautiful, poignant, ugly, graphic, terrible, haunting, brilliant,…..  I have to come back to it.  Maybe it should be required reading for the 4th of July.   (Is “patriotic” too loaded a term for what Hayes is doing?  It is a tortured love of country, for sure.)  I’m sure I didn’t grasp even half of it.  To take the sonnet (?) form for this content is a bold choice, as is the traditional first line index rather than individual titles or even numbers to define discrete poems.  A masterpiece (would Hayes allow the word?) of contemporary poetry and literature more broadly.