A fundamental question at the heart of coming to terms with Iraq’s past is how to address the dead and their absence; address them in both senses of the verb. The relationship of the living to the dead is, of course, a political one and itself a contentious site. Alas, it is not hyperbolic to recognize Iraq itself as an open mass grave. In addition to the victims of Ba`thist dictatorship, many of whom ended in mass graves, there are those million or so victims of the genocidal embargo (1990-2003) who are in a figurative mass grave insufficiently recognized. The ongoing occupation and the civil war produced their own variations of horror in terms of violence and displacement. Iraqis in general and Iraqi producers of culture in particular are haunted by the ghosts of the occupants of this mass grave. This hauntology, to borrow a term from Derrida, is a crucial political as well as a literary trope. These mass graves were and still are appropriated as a political trope or commodity and deployed by the United States and its Iraqi allies to justify the war and invasion. The new mass graves attributed to the militias of the regime and its corrupt police recently discovered are in turn being exploited by some to belittle and ultimately rehabilitate Saddam’s era and erase its own crimes in a futile Manichaean equation of who was worse? My paper examines the effects of the fragmentation and disintegration of Iraq’s material reality and space on the late poetic discourse of one of Iraq’s major poets, Sargon Boulus (1944-2007), who happens to be grossly under-researched in English. How do the traumas of the last two decades reorient his work and which new themes appear and predominate? How is Iraq reconstructed or imagined? How does he excavate the layers of tragedy and carnage and how does he articulate the cogito of grief and mourning! Boulus presents a unique case because he is one of few who succeed in avoiding the usual ideological traps, the snares of outmoded traditions, and facile nostalgia. I will focus on the trope of ghosts as a strategy to articulate a real that is almost inaccessible and seems beyond comprehension or articulation and is thus equivalent to the Lacanian real which resides in a space beyond the grasp of the symbolic and the imaginary and which can only be glimpsed in nightmares.