A note about "It's Important I Remember that the Enemy Is Always Within” from Cortney Lamar Charleston for the Michigan Quarterly Review's Summer 2025 issue: In ways established by historical precedent, the United States of America is an empire, but I speculate most Americans disagree. Empire has an appropriately negative connotation—a system of domination and exploitation spearheaded by tyrants—and thus feels an unfair description of the America in its citizenry’s imagination: the nation that toppled fascism and saved the free world, the longest-standing democracy on Earth. Yet that very America maintains military outposts around the globe; holds foreign countries as “territories”; has built itself into a military and economic superpower while squatting on the ancestral lands of Indigenous nations. My poem, “It’s Important I Remember That the Enemy Is Always Within—,” buckles under these truths, even as it orbits the death of a brutal, criminal man behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks: Osama bin Laden. Undoubtedly, America (meaning the state) and bin Laden were enemies to one another, but what was bin Laden to an ordinary American citizen? An enemy, certainly, though more a conceptual entity than an actual person, a grainy face and voice to slot into our psyche and induce acceptance of violence and dispossession. Enemies are easily made—thus easily replaced—because of our empathic deficiencies. U.S. forces killed bin Laden in 2011, celebrated across the country as justice served, yet our occupation continued another decade. Our soldiers have finally returned and await their next deployment somewhere far away or, perhaps, closer to home: wherever a new enemy is invented that Empire points to as justification for its actions.