SUSPENDED PETALS / *image by Amalie Flynn*

Paris sirens
Pewter sky
The white lace
Of a dogwood bough
At midnight

Reach up
Clutch and huff
Hungry before bed
For the sweetness
Of a rose

But a dogwood
Is a dogwood
And there’s no escaping
The sentence
For the world:

The old blacks
And the new poor
Must die
From the bugs
At the grocery store

Drones police the distance
Between
New Yorkers
Robots shout from spring sky:
Stay away

While sanctions
Strangle Caracas children
Bleed Persian women
And a million singers scream
To the people of the screen

A poet in Madrid
Sits under house arrest
Another in Algiers
Might as well
Be in Madrid

And what do I mean by
Paris sirens
Beyond the sad
Pin pon wail
That cries arretez

I mean a rhythmic wigwag
Just a bit more rounded
Now our own martial horn
But Greensboro, Nazareth,
Athens, Melbourne

It’s all the same sentence tonight:

No more fingertip touches
From the beached weaver
No more whispered breath
From the one making masks
For the world

Just this:

The unyielding petals
Of a midnight limb
As the strange siren hunts
For those with a touch
Of needing too much

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M.C. Armstrong

M. C. Armstrong embedded with JSOF in Al Anbar Province, Iraq. He published extensively on the Iraq war through The Winchester Star. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize. His fiction and non-fiction have appeared in Esquire, The Missouri Review, The Gettysburg Review, Mayday, Monkeybicycle, Epiphany, The Literary Review, and other journals and anthologies. His memoir, 'The Mysteries of Haditha,' was published in 2020 and his acclaimed first novel 'American Delphi, the first part of a trilogy and excerpted here, was published in October 2022 by Milspeak Books. Recently, he curated and edited an issue of The American Book Review called 'Soldier Writing.' He is the lead singer and rhythm guitarist for Viva la Muerte and lives in Greensboro, North Carolina with Yorick, his corgi, whose interruptions to his writing are frequent but welcome.