WHERE WE ARE NOW

Neruda wrote: You are mine; rest your dreams in my dream.
I wish that I could write that to you. I love you that much.
More. But because I do, I couldn’t. Couldn’t possibly.

We are approaching 80; the end is coming more and more into sight—
we’ve begun to feel it in our bones, our throats, even in our thoughts—
and women like you don’t rest their dreams in men’s dreams,
even in macho men’s, like the great Neruda’s. If they ever did.

You and I have had marriages that ended, spouses we watched die.
We have grandchildren, pensions, headaches, joint pains, and regrets
Books we started and will never finish, sweaters we haven’t worn for years.
Life promised so much and has given so much. If not everything.
Some of what we’ve done endures, some disintegrated to ashes, to dust.
You are my star, incandescent, lighting up the inevitable horizon.

As we complete the journey and feel the gravity of the black hole,
what can I offer you now, ask of you, try to provide?
Come in just a little closer and hold me even more tightly.
Walk alongside me, my love. Let’s lean on each other, lean together.
Wrap yourself around me and rest your warm old head on my old head.
Help me to remember. Help me to forget

COURSE CORRECTION

they told me Jesus would save me
but i have done all of the footwork
down here
on the ground
rolling my sleeves up
seeing what i have
a father who hates me
a mother who ignores me
a heart who turns the tenderness of each moment
into a tornado
i do the work
ask questions
write down thoughts
understand learned behavior
question patterns
slowly
brick by brick
i build the church of my own presence
and the altar of my own body

Plowing Water

We return to nightmare
ground, looking over the scene

of the crime, the copper
reflection of little clouds

in the torpid, tainted
canal masking disquiet

and chaos created
in us. Toiling in soft sand

underneath a burden
that would make a mule bleat,

we bitch and moan when told
to drop the rucks. Now we must

dig in, not like blind moles,
but like crippled gravediggers

in broken ground started
by high angle hell. Mangled

sandbags and serrated
pieces of metal pulled from

dirt wounds, also a hand
only missing two fingers.

Using a bayonet,
we bury rancid, fetid

flesh in a hole, puking,
not worried about a name.

Sabat (Loyalty)

Dead bodies stop looking like bodies
after a certain point.

The face, like a popped milar balloon
with all the air blown out the top,

the legs, oddly angled, their bottoms
looking for all the world

like tubes of children’s toothpaste
unevenly squeezed.

No, the dead here never arrive in an
orderly manner, like in the movies.

This is Afghanistan, so they show up
carried in blankets or what’s left

of clothes, bandages waving
like May flags.

But they all go out the same way.

The mullah works systematically,
washing and praying, singsong in his labors.

Next to him, a step back Mortaza watches
them prepare his brother for the next life.

Mohammad Gul was the pride
of Ismail Khel.

Young, handsome, brave.  Funny.
Everyone said he was funny.

You don’t hear that much in Afghanistan,
someone being funny. As they lift what’s left

into the particle board box that looks like
an Ikea desk repurposed

hands seek to guide Mortaza out.  But
he pulls away, he stays.

He watches as they wrap Gul’s head in
cotton and prop it up on

pillows of cheap foam.  They spray him with Turkish
perfume from the bazaar, and then

drape the Afghan flag and the prayer rug over his
box, taping it down with rolls of

scotch tape.  Mortaza sniffs back a tear, both for
his brother and the debt

he knows he’ll now have to pay.  He’s not scared,
just tired, and knows

that somewhere, out in Lakan,  is a man he’s never
met but will kill, as the way demands.

When we walk out, together, my boots slip,
squeaking and squishing on the sodden, dirty
tile.

Surreal Expulsion

PUT—for Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School

Fourteen chairs loiter, emptied, no young bodies
adjusting for the next lesson, hand-raising,
class-clown antic, contemplative talk, pat show
of teen contempt, rhythm beaten with pencil, palm,
bouncing knee, jouncing heal, wise-crack, step
in the impossible problem never to be solved.
Instead, more of the same news, the same vows
taxiing the hellish hallways of feigned intention
but never taking off—the same dazed moments
of the dead. Perhaps their freed spirits now see
through the coal-black tunnel of some eternity
right into the next school’s beehive of victims.
Perhaps they still shadow their three steady mentors
who stood staunch ground in the slow-motion flow
of high-speed ammo. The clip of names shoots holes
clean through law’s callous gut—

PUT_CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCAaron, Helena, and Alex,
Carmen, Peter, Cara, Chris, and Meadow,
PUT_CCCScott, Alaina, Martin, Alyssa, and Nick,
Jamie, Luke, Gina, and “Guac” Joaquin—

PUT_CCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCCwhose roll call
claims only an absurd third of a minute, while
their totaled lives witnessed nearly 5 thousand
wheels of the moon through some 75 trillion miles.
But unlike the pull of that implacable moon,
the glib fever of ‘prayers and condolences’ can’t
turn the tide of memory’s radiating its fixed
fissures scored by shards of glass and bone.
Here, we’re left to settle the moonscape of Too Late
for those whose expelled footsteps befuddle us.
And lauding immortality soothes no better. We
know we relax at our children’s peril, run rash risk
of shoring up the open/closed-carry-frenzied fight,
take false hope in the bundles of white-washed bills.
Anthony Borges took five bullets to shield twenty
surviving friends, sacrificed his soccer stardom
because somehow he knew what he had to do.
His lacerated back and shattered femur scream
in a language we now must teach across America.

In collaboration with So Say We All‘s Veterans Writing Division, founder Justin Hudnall and The Wrath-Bearing Tree‘s Andria Williams had the privilege of serving 21 veterans, active-duty servicemembers, and veteran family members over 2023 by providing four masterclasses followed by an intensive creative writing workshop.

We would like to thank our masterclass teachers, Abby Murray, Halle Shilling, Peter Molin, and Andria Williams for their inspired presentations on the aspects of craft; all of our wonderful participants; and California Humanities for supporting veterans in the arts.

So Say We All and The Wrath-Bearing Tree are proud to showcase a portion of our cohort below. We look forward to reading much more from them in the coming years.

***

***

Connie Kinsey: “The Letters”

In the old gray shoe box with the tattered red lid is four years’ worth of letters.  Most of them are addressed to my mother, but some are addressed to me. Many are written on onionskin and sealed in the familiar FPO airmail envelopes brightly colored red, white and blue. They crinkle and crackle when you touch them. My dad wrote these letters during his four tours of Vietnam–the first in 1966 and the final one in 1972.  

Those years he was away were hard on us all, but of course he took the brunt of it.  He left everything behind.  We missed him.  

He missed everything.

Those letters have been around the world, carted from base to base, and stored in one closet or another since the 1960s.  I have not read all of them yet.  I have not read most of them.

My mother gave me the letters with a warning.  To use her words, there are some pornographic parts. I imagine there might be. He was a young man away from the woman that almost sixty years later he would refer to as the love of his life. 

That’s not the reason I can’t bring myself to read them. I think I’m prepared to see my dad as a fully human male with a healthy sex drive. That might have been difficult when I was a teenager, but in all of those letters he is younger than I am now. Much younger.  The men he led much younger yet.

What I’m not prepared for are the spaces between the words -the things he doesn’t write about — the booby traps, the snipers, the dead bodies, the leeches, the cold c-rations straight from the can. At least, I don’t think he wrote about them.  But I don’t know.  Not yet.

I know of these abominations because I hang out in Vietnam veterans’ groups on Facebook. I never post. I just read. It’s research. The guys know I’m lurking there – I asked permission. I want to know what my dad, what they, went through, but I also don’t want to know. It’s like watching a horror movie while peeking through fingers.

My father, Captain Conrad L. Kinsey, always said the Marine Corps took him as a poor boy and turned him into an officer and a gentleman.  I’m quite sure there was nothing gentlemanly about Vietnam.  But he survived when so many didn’t. 

I adored my father. Most folks did. He was the officer and gentleman he wanted to be since seeing his first Marine in dress blues as a poor 9-year-old boy in Michigan. He had fulfilled a dream and took his oath seriously.

My dad was a commanding officer who lost thirteen of his men in a horrific battle on May 10, 1968, at Ngok Tavak near Chu Lai.  It was Mother’s Day.  They weren’t able to retrieve the bodies. That battle haunted him. Gave him nightmares.  Landed him in a psychiatric ward decades later.

A group of the survivors formed and held reunions every five years in Branson, Missouri. My father finally attended when a group of forensic anthropologists went to Vietnam and retrieved the bodies of his men.  Until they came home, he just couldn’t go. 

After his death, I was invited to attend what turned out to be the last reunion. It was held six months after his funeral.

I ended up drinking too much with a group of men who thought my father a fine gentleman and referred to him as their best commanding officer ever. I cried a lot, but I laughed a lot too.  I have a photograph of four of us – me and three older men, though not older by all that much, our arms around one another’s shoulders, broad smiles on our faces. 

They were able to say to me what they’d never said to their commanding officer.  I was able to ask them questions I’d never been able to ask my dad.  

We bonded that night.  I’m still in touch with some of them. 

It was an important weekend in my life and my grief.  Talking to those men helped me heal from my dad’s death. It had seemed as if the whole world just went on when mine was collapsing.  But those men that night – they remembered, and we remembered the man, the Marine, Captain Conrad L. Kinsey had been.

He’s been gone seven years now. His death was sudden and unexpected though his wounds never healed. He had severe post-traumatic stress disorder.  His experiences branded his heart, brain, and body.  Vietnam, Ngok Tavak and the thirteen who didn’t come home, especially, affected every experience he would have until the Sunday evening we found him dead. 

I’m writing a book of my experiences and his during the Vietnam war. I was young and having an idyllic childhood in Hawaii and then moody teen years in North Carolina. He was doing four tours in hell. Incorporating his letters into this book is important. I must read them.

I must.

*

Author’s note:

The 50th anniversary of the official end of that terrible terrible war is coming up soon – May 7, 2025.  It will be three days short of the 57th anniversary of the battle that broke my father. 

It’s time for me to begin. I can handle my dad’s sexuality, but I am not sure I can handle the unwritten words that became his post-traumatic stress disorder.  

I once had someone dear to me and eight years older say, “Vietnam was not a factor in my life.”  He said it as if tired of hearing my stories, tired of hearing my dad’s stories, bored by us both. I was stunned. He was the right age to serve but had a lucky draft number.  What privilege to have lived through such an era without it leaving a mark. How insolent and insular. 

Vietnam was a heavy load for my family – my father so much more than the rest of us, but we were scarred too. I cry when I open that box of letters. I will cry when I read the letters.  I hope to smile too.  To hear his voice as I read.  But the unknown of what’s in that box haunts me and I’m afraid to begin.

But…Semper fi, Daddy, Semper fi.  You rest in peace now.

– Connie Kinsey

***

George Warchol, “Service in the Middle”

Some inspire movies and books,
and others wind up in the news.
But for defenders with wrenches or keyboards in racks,
publicity wrecks our Service in Quietude.

And somewhere between the snipers and spies
are the middling faithful and true.
But no one tells stories about the comms guys,
they’re complex and they’re boring too.

Such as “Italy Went Dark” and the “Smurf Attack”
And “The Air Traffic Control System in Afghanistan is Down Again” too.
But the clever fixes among cables, and packets, and stacks…
They’re cool! But they would not interest you.

They say “All gave some, and some gave all”
and that’s true In Arms, sisters, and brothers.
But the defining phrase for answering the call, is
“Less than some; More than others”

Shep’rding the Team and The Job carried out,
that’s full time, and full effort, and much of what Service to Nation is all about.
But the pow’rs demand our grind and our continual waiting hurry,
“Waste yourself in OUR Way of Attainment! Or Be FOREVER Unworthy!”

“Climb the ladder, collect and achieve,
Stripes and baubles and slash up the sleeve!”
“Fill the reports with heroic deeds!”
“Promote!” “Promote!” MAKE them believe!

And like promotes like and after evil doth enter,
the Teeth of the Grinder do harden and render
Honesty’s kernel as powder in blender,
seeking to crush and to force The Surrender.

But instead, I’m finding my place in creative belong,
buoyed among words and not stripes.
And I’m finding my voice in verse and in song,
and in my choices towards effort, and living, and life.

And coming to terms with all that’s gone past,
I at last come to seek My Own Peace.
My Terms. My Service. My Sorrows. My Joys.
My ways to meet my own Needs.

I’ve done things you can not,
and you’ve done things I could never.
But the greatest of treasures, of gifts to be caught,
Is finding ourselves…and keeping ourselves together.

*

George Warchol, “Give and Get”

Give it up.
Give it up and get going.
Let it go,
and get on your way.

Listen up
and teach yourself freedom.
Write down your story,
you’ve got so much to say.

Lift your head.
Don’t abandon yourself.
Find your starting ground,
and don’t you retreat.
Just hang on.
I promise I’ll be there,
I’ll catch you.
Just try to stay on your feet.

Put it down.
It’s too much to carry.
Talk it out.

Don’t bury it deep.
Begin to trust
and be
just
a little less wary.
Let us help you begin to see.

To see something different
from all that you’ve known.
To perceive there is more
than your bearing alone.

See that we,

that we want you with us.

You have done so much good.
You are worthy of trust.

Just get up.
Get up and get going.
Begin to move.
Please, just shuffle your feet.
There’s still light ahead.
And there’s still movement showing.
And there’s still a good chance
for some kind of peace.

Everyone suffers.
But not all the time.
Not forever. Not always…

But always for some of the time.

And If redemption be needed,
then know that suffering need not be without value.
Grind the growth from it.
Squeeze it for purpose.
If nothing else,
it shapes us for something more.
Perhaps to fit us for more acts of tomorrow.

From the middle I can only tell you of what I see.
But from in front of it,
I can look back,
and tell something,
of what it means
against the background
of former,
forged ideas,
and
old,
cold,
hard,
sharpened facts.

Get in front of it.
We must put this behind.
Get in front of it.
We must stop wasting time.
Get in front of it.
We are not going alone.
Get in front of it,
and tell it to push you home.

You can watch George’s beautiful reading of his work here.

*

***

Mariah Smith — No One Left Behind

“Every man is guilty of all the good he did not do.” – Voltaire

I’d already been awake for a day and half when the bombs went off.  Physically, I was in a hotel room in the Willard Intercontinental in Washington DC, but mentally, I was outside the gates of the Kabul International Airport, in the crush of scared and desperate people, trying to guide a number of Afghan families through the mob that surrounded it. My friend Dee, an Afghan American, who I had served with in Khost Province in 2007, was doing the same for her cousins and aunts and uncles. She was the one who texted me first, the instant after the explosion at the airport gate, and moments later the pictures started flooding in. The images were live-streamed into my brain, becoming indelible memories, through the phone screen my eyes had been glued to since August 15th 2021, the day the Taliban entered the city. The pictures showed people running holding their children, covered in dirt and soot from the blast, torn and bloodied clothing littering the streets. A thousand dropped and crushed water bottles. Dee called me on WhatsApp a few minutes later as we tried to get accountability of the Afghans we had been communicating with. In the end all we could do was cry wordlessly together at the futility and the anger we felt.

Hanging up the phone, I closed my eyes in exhaustion for a few minutes and let the despair wash over me. There had been very little sleep the past 9 days. The King sized bed in the quiet hotel room threatened to swallow me. The same hotel room where I had put on a dress and good earrings the previous day, pinned my hair up, and walked into a meeting where I asked for, and received $250,000 from Boeing’s veterans group to help fund our evacuation efforts. Until a week ago, I had never done any fundraising before and now we were asking for six figures at a time. Instead of sleeping I got up, walked into the marble bathroom, brushed my teeth, splashed water on my tear streaked face, put on a ball cap to cover my unwashed hair and went downstairs to the conference room where the others were. There was more work to be done. 

The first interpreter I ever worked with was named Joseph, or that was the name he used when he was with our unit. He joined our platoon of MPs a few days into the Iraq War in March of 2003. He recalled being a teenager when Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990/1991 and the US kicked off Desert Storm. When the US returned again 12 years later, he immediately volunteered to help. One night, all of us lieutenants were called to the bombed out building on Tallil Air Base that we were using as a temporary command post to meet our interpreters. The first one wouldn’t shake my hand, informing me of his religious restrictions against touching women. I was the only female officer in the company. Joseph stepped forward and shook my hand warmly, his kind smile and direct eye contact dispelling the embarrassment and irritation I had felt the moment before. War was new to all of us at that time. We were excited – we felt like we were going on a big adventure. None of us knew it would dominate and sometimes consume the next almost 20 years of our lives. 

I don’t know what we would have done without Joseph. It wasn’t just that he could speak the language and we couldn’t. He showed a group of inexperienced Soldiers what a war is like for the people whose home is where it is being fought. What was at stake. What to do when you encounter children on the battlefield, the elderly, the injured citizens. All the realities none of us had lived before but would live many times over in the years to come.

In the years that followed there were more deployments including three tours to Afghanistan. And right around the time I was done with the Army, America had decided it was long past done with Afghanistan, we started negotiating with the Taliban and set a timeline to leave. I will never forget the sadness on General Miller’s face in one of the last televised interviews of units pulling out. He sat on a concrete perimeter barrier and talked to the reporter, no inflection in his voice, only fatigue, perhaps hiding the regret and disagreement he felt with the decision. One of the younger Soldiers who was interviewed said she hadn’t even been born yet when the Towers fell on 9/11. 

Downstairs in the conference room of the Willard, 18 years after that first meeting with an interpreter, I was trying to make things right. A dozen other grim, exhausted people, most of them fellow veterans, sat in a horseshoe formation of tables behind laptops. Many were from other non-profits like ours, No One Left Behind. The tables were littered with Redbulls and spitters. Messages continued to pour in from people who were working inside the airport grounds, those on the streets where the bombs went off, and other veterans from all over the country trying to find and help their interpreters. A congressional committee staffer who was also an Army 82nd Airborne veteran like me, texted: “Hey – are you hearing that the Kabul airport is shutting down? The gates are all being closed and nobody else is being allowed in?”

We had been talking and sharing information all week. Those of us in that conference room had a direct connection to US troops on the ground inside the airport. I had just heard that the Marines were bulldozing shut the gate that had been bombed, welding them closed behind earthworks. After the bombs, no one else was getting in. 

“Yep, it’s true.” I confirmed. 

“WTF?! Blinken and Hicks told Senators this afternoon on their call that ops would continue at least until the 31st.”

“We are struggling to even get American Citizens on the airfield right now.” I told him about the earthen berms being erected to block access to the airport, all while American citizens waved their passports and Afghan interpreters desperately waved their visa paperwork outside the razor wire. “Everything I have seen is indicating we are done evacuating. They lied.” I set my phone down, disgusted at the way we were leaving our allies. Not even the Senate Intelligence Committee was getting straight answers.

A few hours later I watched in furious disbelief as the President addressed the country from the Oval office, a row of American flags behind him. He praised the bravery of the orderly withdrawal and reiterated the rightness of ending the War in Afghanistan. The group of us volunteers stood in front of the TV with our arms crossed, numbly watching the canned and false message being peddled. It was a pathetic attempt to try and spin the gigantic cluster fuck we had watched unfold over the past ten days into something resembling a strategic plan. I couldn’t believe anyone would buy his empty statements. Did they even care about the scale of suffering that was happening on the ground in Afghanistan? The senior leaders at the State Department sure didn’t seem to. As the US prepared to abandon the embassy in Kabul some US employees in the visa office burnt all of the Afghan passports and documents they had custody of. These were the golden tickets for the Afghans who had earned a Special Immigrant Visa to the US through their work with the American military or government. Although the burning was ‘standard procedure’ for preparing to abandon an embassy, in this case to the enemy, this action further sealed the fate of those who were so close to making it out yet still trapped.

Someone switched off the TV, and we walked to Old Ebbits Grill, a Washington DC institution. We ordered some much-needed alcohol. One of the other volunteers arrived a few minutes after the first wave of us, spotted my Old Fashioned on the table, asked if he could taste it, and knocked it back in one swallow, cherry and all, before his ass even landed in his chair. The table shrieked with hysteria tainted laughter. We were all a little unhinged from the horror of the past several days. 

For almost two years, I’ve tried to think of a coherent way to talk about those two weeks in August 2021 and the months that followed. It was both the worst thing I’ve ever witnessed and some of the most moving work I’ve ever been a part of.  

In April and May of 2023 No One Left Behind was contacted by a team from Japanese public TV. They wanted to do a story on our organization along with the Afghan women who had been part of the female tactical platoon (FTPs, they were called in short). This consumed my life for a month but ended up being very cathartic. One of the themes of their show was moral injury among veterans. “The Japanese people do not have the experience with this. The generation that fought in WWII never spoke of it and there have not been conflicts since. We also do not want them to forget what is happening to the Afghan people.” At the time of this writing I am still waiting for the documentary to be released. I don’t know what angle they will take the story. Although I came to trust the production team, both women close in age to me, I have to recognize that they are from a different country and I don’t know how they will paint the United States and our involvement in Afghanistan. I still hold a security clearance for work, and I held this in my mind every time they interviewed me. Although I was mostly open with them, I was not able to fully share the depth of the doubt and anger I was feeling at my own country’s clumsy and sometimes arrogant involvement in a 20 year war that we lost. It was hard to even put it in writing for this essay. In a way it feels like treason. 

“Tell us the story of the skinny, scared woman again.” The Japanese camera woman zoomed her lens towards me. They must have asked me half a dozen times, referring to a story I had told them about searching Afghan women on a compound that Special Forces raided along with our ANA partners. My job was to search the women on the compound and this particular young woman was likely in her 20s as I was. As I searched her for weapons, in her own home, that I had invaded I was struck by how malnourished and frail she felt under my hands. Although I was gentle, I stood behind her with my boot between her two sandled feet and felt the fragility and lightness of her body, ashamed of my own camouflaged and armored presence restricting her movement and how easily I could have hurt her if that had been my intent. 

I think they liked this story because it drew a stark contrast between the American soldiers and the Afghan people whose country they were occupying. But that was the opposite of the Afghans in the military and government we had worked with. We were working collectively for a better future. And then that was snatched away from all of us. I say snatched, but it was years of poor strategy, a rotational plan that didn’t work, a lack of focus, and a misunderstanding of the durability of the Taliban. When we lost and were cut off from our friends in the most chaotic, traumatizing way possible, all we wanted was to be able to be with our friends again and help them live safely. It wasn’t about the differences, it was about our common humanity. 

“Tell us about your PAIN and the GUILT” the camerawoman and interviewer would say. Emphasis on these sad words. Each interview led to a request for another, often revisiting the same topic 6 or 8 times. They wanted to hear more about my deployments in Afghanistan, hoping for a good shoot ’em up story I regretted and I think they were a little disappointed in the relative calmness of my deployments. Although they wanted the Japanese people to know the Afghans stuck under Taliban rule were still suffering, with few options, we didn’t talk much about the withdrawal itself. 

I met Efat when we interviewed her for the Japanese public TV show. She had been a female police woman, a job she loved. Now she was trapped at home. During our interview she cried helplessly and the feeling of watching a strong woman in such despair was gut wrenching. How do you help someone keep hope alive in these circumstances? I felt very helpless and grateful for the friends that have been able to leave. What does Efat have to look forward to? She was the one who made me confront, most clearly the reality for women left there. When I interviewed her, her surroundings looked like a mud walled compound with little furniture inside and a small assortment of basic kitchen implements. She told us they had sold a majority of their possessions in order to live. She was dressed in a loose black robe with a black scarf ready to wind over her hair if she stepped outside. The way she sobbed softly tore at my heart. There was nothing I could do or say to help or that made anything better in any way. How terrible to be trapped so completely in your own country, after having lived a different life of relative freedom as a young adult.

No One Left Behind continues to evacuate people out of Afghanistan, mainly through funding their travel to Pakistan while they wait to finish processing at the US embassy in Pakistan. We set a goal to help 1000 leave in 2023 and we met that goal on 30th of June. We set a new goal of 2000 and we made that goal also in late October. There are still so many people trying to help, but it will really take a change in US and international policy to allow everyone who needs to leave Afghanistan to make it to safety.  The overwhelming need makes our efforts feel like a drop in the bucket. 

It was almost nine months after the evacuation when Latifa and har family arrived at Dulles airport in May of 2022. They had been waiting in Iceland for the past 4 months while their US visa was finished. Latifa was the primary applicant, which was less common for the woman to be the primary applicant, less than 10% . After having NOLB consume my life for almost a year, and to be overwhelmed by the amount of people reaching out that we couldn’t yet help evacuate, I realized it became important for me to help one person, one family, and to see what the experience was actually like for a new family arriving. This felt like it was as much for my redemption and well-being as it was for theirs. They came to live with me, making progress in starting their new lives though they still feel the wounds of the country they left and the life they lost that is now no longer possible in their native land.

The night after I left the Williard back in August of 2021, the night after the last US plane left the airfield in Afghanistan, I was at a black tie event in Virginia horse country where I live now. It felt surreal, rich horse people in the most beautiful part of Virginia and that night I felt very removed from it, like a disoriented witness. I was still fully immersed in the violence and tragedy of what I had seen.  I felt like I had been deployed, even though I hadn’t left DC. At one point I started to tear up, overwhelmed, and my date walked me out to the large balcony where we watched the guests dancing, brightly lit through the plate glass windows, while we were shadowed in the summer night, the music from inside competing with the sounds of frogs and crickets. Teenage girls in their homecoming and prom dresses, jumped about joyfully on the dance floor in small groups or with their parents. The stark contrast between their safety and inhibition and what girls their own age had just gone through and what their lives in Afghanistan would be like now. 

This is the story I wish I wasn’t telling. I wish our war had ended differently. After investing all that time and lost lives and lives forever changed, our country’s leaders had us walk away in the most humiliating way possible and leave our friends behind in a near hopeless situation. However, our work with No One Left Behind continues. While we are still helping people depart Afghanistan on the Special Immigrant Visa program we are also very focused on helping them restart their lives here in America. And this is where my faith in my fellow citizens remains strong. The kindness and generosity by regular people we have seen extended to these newly arrived Afghan refugees is incredible to witness. Restarting a life and a career in a new country is exceptionally challenging and so many Americans have stepped up to help in a thousand different ways. For a period of time after the withdrawal I was hyper focused on the horror and unfairness of what had happened to so many Afghans and how it affected the veteran community. But now my focus has shifted more to the good we are able to be part of.

***

Reinetta Vaneendenberg — A.O.R.

Letter from Hotel California 1 epistolary
The Hall of Valor 3 prose
Vet Killed by Granby ST Hit/Run 4 newspaper reportage
Obituaries 5 newspaper reportage
Collateral Damages of A.O.R. Ambiguities 6 scratch-out poem
Crossing Granby Street 8 poem encased by fragments
++++++++++

28/8/2017 Hotel California haha (same as before)

Dear Liz,
A volunteer is typing this for me since my hands are bandaged. His name is Jonathan and
he’s here allot getting new legs and his gut fixed. Sometimes we play backgammon like you and
I did that year in the sandbox. I move pieces with my good finger.
It was great talking to you last night. I’ve been thinking about you allot today. You—in a
good place now, with a room of your own at the veteran house. It’s ok to accept the room and the food and the clothes. You’re a vet and all that is for vets. Not everyone can be lucky like me and spend a year at Hotel John Hopkins in lovely Baltimore.

Last night when we talked you were mad again about the AOR crap but we couldn’t do
anything. It’s over and done with and over and done. Listen hear, you and I aren’t responsible for the 10,000 dead from 9/11 and its wars,
so you need to let that go.

Take those five fuckin “Xs” off your fuckin hat. Sailors don’t count our kills or anyone
else’s. Shake your red hair free. We did the best we could with the crappy equipment and
leadership. Like Nam, man: who’s the enemy? Our interpreter, Fahad? A kid? A fruit vendor? Congress sucks! How can they tell us who’s a threat? When we can or can’t shoot? They’re a million miles away. In fuckin DC.

I must a got all stirred up after our call because I had that same dream again last night, the one with you standing in your battle dress, head down and walking, not watching where you’re going and I’m yelling “Liz! Look out! LIZ!” But you keep walking. I keep yelling. I wake up sweating, crying. You always had rotten situational awareness. I guess that’s why we made it as battle buddies.

We had good war-fighting skills. The rules of engagement said when we could shoot. The
area of responsibility—the lines for bullets, bodies and bags were clearly drawn on maps,
directives, messages for Afghanistan, Iraq. I don’t know why we were sent where we oughtn’t to of been. Boundaries are boundaries.

You’re right it was a set up because there was no way we could have guessed that little
girl had a bomb in her dolly basket.

Have you heard about the lieutenant? Someone came by saying the Navy was not
promoting her because of the explosion. I don’t think it was her fault that we went where we weren’t ‘supposed to and her being in the navy not the army. I agree with you that w

I don’t think it was her fault that we went where we weren’t ‘supposed to be’ and her being in the navy not the army. I agree with you that we were setup because Fahad didn’t go with us and he always wanted to be with us everywhere.

The sandbox is a strange place for sailors. Don’t you think so? How can our Navy not
promote a young officer who is eating the same crap we had to and live like we had to and the Elephants keep changing the AOR and ROE? At least she didn’t get hurt. She got home in one piece to her wife and kids.

Jonathan’s nice, a handsome dude. Maybe you could have coffee with him when you
visit. I know you come from blue blood but not all guys are like those
Our families are so fucked up. Mine tries but they don’t understand, even my dad who
did Vietnam. They returned to disdain and us as heroes but are forgotten a month after returning anyway. None of it is anyone’s responsibility. Hope you get this litter at your new address before our next call.

The docs say I’m doing ok and can see you whenever you come up from Norfolk. I’m
sorry for the mix up last time. I had the dates wrong. And here you rode the bus all day. Sorry.

Time is jumbled between surgeries and meds. You know what I mean—you have allot of meds to. I was in OR for reconstructing surgery the day you came. I don’t see much that they can do— nine fingers got blown off and all the operations won’t bring them back—but those doctors go figure they always have an idea how to make a bad thing better. Next operation is to make the whole in my gut better.

The only good things in my life are you and Jonathan as friends. The rest is crap. Look
forward to your weekly call. Same time same station.

So, now I really have to go because Jonathan has to go to PT. Remember when that
meant physical training, a chance to burn off some steam? Now it’s pain and torture.
I asked him to sign this for me so you’d know it was really from me but he laughed.

Just believe it’s from me,
your battle buddy,
Mary

The Hall of Valor
lists all
6906
U.S. military who have died during the Global War on Terror
in Operation Enduring Freedom, Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation New Dawn.
This Hall of Valor is a searchable database
by name, operation, month and year. It can also sort
by death date, oldest to newest or newest to oldest.

Viewed 3DEC2017: thefallen.militarytimes.com

VET KILLED BY GRANBY ST. HIT/RUN
NORFOLK
Dispatch reported an anonymous call 2:12 p.m.,
28 August 2017, about a hit-and-run at Granby Street and Thole Street
intersection in the Suburban Acres area of Norfolk. The caller said a
person was hit by a compact brown car. An emergency crew was on
scene within 4 minutes of the call, followed by an ambulance 3
minutes later.

There were no identifying documents found on the victim. She was
pronounced DOA at DePaul Hospital.

Police found no witnesses.
The victim has been identified as Elizabeth C. Stanton, 37, a U.S.
Navy veteran. Burial services pending.
Anyone with information about this accident is asked to call Norfolk Police Investigations.

obituaries
Elizabeth C. Stanton
NORFOLK – 37, Funeral
service: 8 a.m. Monday, on
Sept. 11, 2017, Virginia State
Veterans Cemetery, Suffolk.

Collateral Damages of A.O.R. Ambiguities

Area of Responsibility inside outside
the enemy outside inside
ordersdogtagsdufflebagI.D.cellphonesmokes
Iraq on the Way Back
Domino Theory
burqa door-to-door
An improvised explosive device I.E.D.
is a hidden bomb Blows up patrol
convoy missing body parts Balad
Bagram Air Base Afghanistan
we don’t know where the leg is Politicians
make up rules of engagement R.O.E.
tasty fish eggs grow into the child as I.E.D. who will lead us
hightechhighbodycount out-foxed
push meds push to keep/up with them
Ramstein Air Force Base Germany
VA Hospital amputations prosthetics thumb
Hand Calf Legs Charles C. Carter Center for Mortuary
Affairs, Dover Air Force Base, Delaware
Warmonger body armor/MadeinChina/budget hearings
re-take, re-deploy, re-calibrate
Fall of Berlin,Hanoi,Fallujah.
HailMaryFullofGrace
It has been 16 years

Senator, Is the 22-Veterans-Per-Day Suicide Rate Data Reliable?
Do you have stats for correlation with
Homelessness? Alcoholism? Drug abuse?
VA Failure rates? CPTSD? TBI ? 

See: the Latin cida, killer
S u i cide me
Fr a t ri cide us
G e n o cide them
CNN reports an increased rate of blue-on-blue violence as military kill their own
By the book By the book
6 Bythebook
6 Bythebookbythebook t hebookCP
9 By book T
0 ook S
2 ok D
nobook
Allah M.C.
Mission Co
Com
Comp

black body bagsbagbags

Black
Hawk

W
a
r

She charged the crosswalk as if rushing the landing zone,
right arm propelled red pony-tailed floppy head.
Hot wash rose from swampy beach traffic.
I saw her as a unit, an interruption across my line of sight.
The uniform of a street person, I presumed, with time to
look during the long light. I turned up the AC.
Flicked the auto-lock.
Black wool beret, with five white Xs pinned on it.
Hawaiian shirt, glaring blue, green, yellow
Camouflage pants, too big or her now too small.
Black mocs like clown shoes, pale heels peeking out,
as if her feet had lost the mass for boots.
She was closing on the sidewalk, focused on the mark—
When the light turned, I shifted the Vette into first
just as horns blasted.

Reinetta Van explores identity and historical perspective issues in hybrid forms. Her work has appeared in The War Horse  and anthologies Sisters in Arms: Lessons We’ve Learned and Things We Carry Still: Poems and Micro-Stories About Military Gear. Van (captainvanusnavy@gmail.com) scribbled A.O.R.’s first draft June 12, 2017, and hopes to express someday why this piece sticks in her craw. You can hear her read from her work here.

***

Tom Keating – REMF

Richie handed me a bandolier.

“Another fucking waste of twelve hours,” he said. The green cloth pockets each held a magazine filled with eighteen rounds for the M16 battle rifle slung on my shoulder. It was almost 1800 hours, and we were going on perimeter guard duty till 0600 hrs. the next morning. Ninety-eight degrees, and our jungle fatigues were soaked with sweat.

We loaded up the truck in the company area for perimeter guard duty, which we were assigned to do every couple of weeks. Twelve hours sitting in a hot, wet, smelly sandbagged bunker on our sector of the Army base perimeter. Twelve hours of boredom.

“I’d rather be typing the fucking monthly fuel consumption report,” I replied. “This sucks, again.”

“Can it, you two, and get on the truck,” yelled Sergeant Hollis, the sergeant of the guard for this shift.

The twelve of us climbed on the open truck, wearing helmets and heavy, sweaty flak vests, our rifles slung on our shoulders. The truck drove out to the perimeter along the dirt road behind the tall, barbed-war fence of our base. Two small Vietnamese villages were just four hundred meters from the fence, and the locals who lived there would come into the main gate each day, get checked by MPs, and then go to work on our base as cooks, laundry workers, and housemaids.

The combat troops called us REMFs, rear echelon motherfuckers; support troops that made the war possible with our typing, driving, computer programming and other work skills needed in a modern Army. We do the paperwork that feeds the war with everything from body bags to bullets. Our base and living quarters the grunts (infantry) call luxury. We had beds, daily hot chow, plenty of water and in some cases, air-conditioned offices.

Most of the soldiers assigned to this logistics base were trained to be Army administrative types. Some, like me, who were trained for infantry, were assigned as clerks or typists when we arrived. The Army marches on paper. I knew I lucked out with this assignment, instead of being in combat.

Every couple of weeks we were pulled from our offices, trucks and repair shops and thrown together for bunker guard duty, strangers to each other. The truck arrived at our bunker’s situated on large earthen berms on the perimeter near one of the gates into our base. The truck stopped, and Sergeant Hollis got out, walked to the rear, and said,

“Kearney, Philips, Richie and Denton, you four here, in bunker number one.”

We hopped off the truck. Someone handed us our weapons, flares, ammunition for the M60 machine gun, extra canteens, and a box of C-rations. Richie carried two rolls of toilet paper. The truck drove down to the next bunker. We waited while Philips picked up a stone and threw it into our bunker.

“Hope ole snaky aint in there today.”

Cobras loved our bunkers; they provided shade for the cold-blooded reptiles, who also enjoy the rats that live there, too. We threw stones in the bunker to let Snaky know we’re coming in. Sure enough, he slithered out, an eight-foot-long cobra. The snake turned and retreated into the brush near the barbed wire. Philips threw in another rock and waited. Nothing. We carefully entered the bunker, our home for the next twelve hours. There were no bushes or tall grass around our bunker. Defoliant sprayed every week made sure of that.

I set the machine gun on its bipod, positioned it out the center bunker port. We took off our helmets and flak vests, and settled in. The heat and stink inside the bunker was unbearable. Richie and Denton went outside behind the bunker to smoke some weed. Philips and I took the guard position, looking out at the villages.

Philips said he was a truck mechanic for the 350th TC (Transportation Company). A short, stocky fellow, he speaks with a hillbilly accent. “Kearney, where you from?”

Before I could reply Richie came back in. Richie was tall and lanky. He shoved his glasses up higher on his large nose and announced, “Put on your gear, the sergeant is coming to check, and he’s got the ELL-TEE with him.”

We put on our helmets, shirts and vests and waited. Sergeant Hollis called us together outside the bunker. Lieutenant Nack, the officer of the guard this shift, stood behind the sergeant. Nack’s tailored fatigue was dark with sweat. Hollis was an experienced soldier who had fought in Korea. He gave us our instructions.

“Okay, you guys know the drill. Two on two off, two hours. Kearney, I want you on the machine gun. Richie, check the commo line. You are Reno 4. Do it now.”

Richie picked up the field phone handset, pressed the key and said, “Bravo One, Reno 4 commo check.” Richie put the receiver down. “We’re good to go, Sergeant.”

Sergeant Hollis replied, “Okay. Do that at least once an hour. Me and the lieutenant will do another check later tonight and bring more water. Anything else, Lieutenant?”

Nack stepped forward. He wore the custom fit new model body armor jacket that zipped up the front. “Stay alert, men. Keep your eyes open tonight, Intel says we are sure to get hit by Charlie.” He stepped back. Nack worked in the finance office, probably hadn’t fired a weapon since Basic Training or whatever reserve officers went through. They turned and got back in the Jeep and left.

Philips asked as he took off his gear, “Kearney, you think the EL-TEE was just bullshitting about an attack?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, “It is the big Chinese New Year festival, I would expect them all to be celebrating, not fighting.” We settled in, looking for movement in front of us.

Denton and Richie relieved us two hours later. The sun was almost gone, so Phillips and I went outside, where it was cool, the air fresh. Trucks and Jeeps kept coming and going out of the gate near our bunker. Philips used the piss tube alongside the bunker, and I sipped warm water from my canteen. Just then the field phone chirped. Richie picked it up.

“Reno 4.” His eyes got large, and he looked over at me.

“Roger, yellow alert. Reno 4.”

Yellow alert meant some shit was going down. We hustled back into the bunker. I drew back the cocking lever of the M 60 and put my shoulder against the stock. I looked out the port. Richie and Denton picked up their rifles. Denton looked confused. He didn’t know what to do with the rifle. I looked over and said,

“Denton, put the magazine into the rifle, then pull the charging handle. Put your selector switch off safety to fire. Richie, give him a hand.” These guys were clerks and typists, not infantry. Finally, their rifles were locked and loaded. We waited. I saw the gate being closed; Vietnamese workers on the post being hustled out of the gate as it closed. A Military Police Jeep pulled up to the gate, with an M60 machine gun mounted and manned. Damn!

“We have to check the claymores to be sure the wires are okay. Who wants to go with me?” Philips nodded his head. “Okay. Denton and Richie, eyes front. If you see anything move, shoot it. We’ll be right back.”

The two of us exited the bunker and found the claymore wires leading from the bunker. We followed along in the fading light all the way to the mines which were thirty feet in front of the bunker. Everything looked okay, the wires attached to the blasting caps, positioned “FRONT TOWARD ENEMY.” We ran back to the bunker. I heard a rumble, like thunder. The phone chirped again. Richie answered,

“Understand. Red alert. Reno 4.” Richie hung up and relayed the news. “The VC are attacking Bien Hoa Air Base, and we may be next! Holy Shit!” We were jacked up with adrenaline and fear. The booms were louder, closer. The stutters of a machine gun could be heard. The field phone chirped again. I picked it up.

“Reno 4,” I said into the handset.

“Reno 4, stand by. Victor Charlie spotted in the village 400 meters your front. TAC air on the way. Get low in your bunker.”

“Reno 4.”

“Get down,” I shouted, “TAC Air!” Everyone crouched down below the sandbag wall of the bunker. We heard the roar of an F4 Phantom jet, and two large explosions. The F4 Phantom roared away. I cautiously looked over the sandbag port. The villages were gone, just smoke and fire. Nothing was moving in front of us. I looked over to the gate, the MP Jeep was gone, replaced by an Armored Personnel Carrier (APC). Before I could process this, we heard more firing and some small explosions, grenades most likely. Then it got quiet. The firing stopped. Nothing moved. The phone chirped again. I picked it up.

“Reno 4.”

“Reno 4, stand down from Red alert. Alert status now yellow. alert status yellow.” The sergeant arrived shortly after we relaxed. ELL-TEE wasn’t with him. I told him our situation.

“Sergeant, we went on red alert,” I looked at my watch, “60 minutes ago, just got word to stand down to yellow. TAC Air blew up the villages to our front. All weapons locked and loaded.”

“Okay, Kearney. Stay alert. This may go on all night.” Hollis drove over to the next bunker.

I turned to the guys. “Let’s get back to the guard schedule: two on two off, two hours. Stay alert. If you think you are gonna fall asleep, move around, take deep breaths. Me and Philips will take the first watch.”

Philips and I looked out the bunker towards the destroyed village. Damn! the jet just blew it away! There were people there earlier. I hope they got out before the bombs. Jeesus! No movement at all. We could hear the chatter of machine gun fire and explosions far down the perimeter on our left. The APC roared away towards the fighting. We were alone in the darkness.

“Kearney, I’m scared.” Said Philips.

“Me, too,” I replied. The lights at the gate cast some in front of our bunker. Richie and Denton were napping outside. The sounds of battle diminished. We started to relax. After forty minutes I was fighting the urge to close my eyes and sleep when Philips whispered to me.

“Kearney, I see somebody moving!”

“Where?” I jerked alert.

“Over to the left, see it?”

I slowly turned left, and yes; someone was slowly crawling towards bunker two on our left. A sapper! I turned to my right and saw someone else crawling towards us. Two sappers! They got through the wire somehow and were about forty feet away.

“Philips, ” I whispered, “you fire right, I fire left. Go!”

I fired my M16 four times at the guy. Bunker 2 must have seen the sapper too and fired their M60 machine gun. The red tracer rounds bounced off the ground in front of the crawlers. The sapper on the right got up on his knees to fire a B40 rocket at our bunker, just as Philips hit him. He fell back, and the rocket went sailing over our position and exploded behind us. Denton and Richie were now wide awake.

“Jee-sus! You got them,” shouted Denton.

“Keep looking,” I said. “There may be more.” My heart was pumping fast. My vision had sharpened. I scanned in front and on both sides, even looked behind us. But there wasn’t anyone else.

My infantry training told me to go out and check the bodies. I ran, crouched, to the first body. He was deformed by the rounds he took from me and the M60 from bunker two. His right arm was missing. Picked up his rifle and slung it on my shoulder. I checked him for papers, found some.

The B40 rocket guy was twenty feet away. Philips’ shot had blown his head apart. I wanted to throw up, but I held it in. I picked up his launcher and the rockets he carried. No papers on him. I ran in a crouch back to the bunker. I threw up outside the bunker entrance, then went in and picked up the phone.

“Bravo One, Reno 4.”

“Reno 4.”

“Weapons fired. Two enemy Kilos. No Whiskeys, (Army code for dead and wounded), two weapons recovered.”

“Roger, Reno 4. Continue alert.” We could hear some explosions and rapid firing along the perimeter, but it was quiet near us. Philips looked at me, his eyes were wet.

“I shot deer and squirrels back home,” he said. “But these were men! Jeesus! I don’t want to do that again, Kearney.”

“I know,” I said. “It is fucking awful, but they were going to kill you and me and Denton an’ Richie. We didn’t have a choice.”

“Shit,” said Denton, “I wanna get outta this fucking bunker and this fucking country.”

“Shut the fuck up, Denton, you just got here,” said Richie. “You aint going anywhere for a year. Kearney’s right, it was us or them.”

Philips went outside, still upset. Denton and Richie took over the guard. I stayed in the bunker. I was suddenly hungry, feeling lightheaded as the adrenaline left me. I could not relax, though.

Time passed, and we heard no more shooting. When the sun came up, smoke was rising from the village. The two enemy bodies were still there in front of our bunkers, flies feasting on them. We heard no battle noise, just a few random rifle shots somewhere down the line. Sergeant Hollis and Lieutenant Nack were coming down the access road in the jeep. Hollis stopped the Jeep, and I went out to meet him and Nack. I nodded at Nack. No saluting officers near the wire.

Sergeant Hollis said, “Situation, Kearney.”

“Sergeant, all quiet. No further attack on this section since 2300 hrs. Two dead sappers out front, I policed their weapons and some papers taken from their bodies.” I pointed at the two weapons and the papers tucked in the corner.

Nack looked startled. He scowled at me, “Specialist, who told you to take the weapons and papers?” Hollis rolled his eyes, very slightly.

“Sir,” I said, “that’s SOP, disarm the enemy dead and check for any intel. They told us that at Fort Jackson.”

“Oh, you were infantry,” he snarled.

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, You should have left the weapons there and notified me.” He wanted credit for the weapons capture. It would look good on his record, and maybe a medal. He took a small note pad from his breast pocket and a pen.

“I need your name and your unit and commanding officer.”

“Sir, Specialist 4th Class Kearney, I am an administrative aide to General Stark at headquarters supply, fuel division.” Nack looked surprised. That brought him up. He didn’t want to fuck with one of the general’s boys. He put the notepad back in his pocket.

“Okay. Sergeant, take charge of the weapons and documents, and contact the engineers to remove the bodies.”

“Yes sir.” He went into the bunker and retrieved the weapons. “Kearney, I’ll make sure you get credit for the captured weapons.” Nack threw an angry look at the Sergeant as Hollis put them in the back of the Jeep and climbed behind the wheel.

“Thanks, Sergeant,” I replied.

“Good job, men. Your relief is on its way.” The Lieutenant said as he hopped back in the Jeep. Hollis drove away as the field phone chirped. I picked it up.

“Reno 4, Alert status Yellow.”  I turned to the guys, who were tired, dirty, and still jacked up on adrenaline.

“Alert Yellow, we can relax.” Then we heard the truck coming to bring us our relief. It was 07:00hrs. I took off my flak vest and sucked my canteen dry. Phillips had recovered somewhat and smiled at me. I could hardly wait to get back to those fucking fuel consumption reports.

Tom Keating is a Vietnam Veteran who kept a journal during the war in Vietnam, which enabled him to publish his memoir, Yesterday’s Soldier: A Passage from Prayer to the Vietnam War. He has also published in The Veteran, the Military Writers Society of America’s Dispatches, The Vietnam Memorial 40th Anniversary Tribute, 0-Dark-Thirty from the Veterans Writing Project, the Microlit Almanac from Birch Bark Editing, and The Wrath-Bearing Tree. He lives west of Boston with his wife Kathleen. You can hear him read from his work here.

***

Nancy Stroer – What Do You Expect?

The Rooster’s nose was his most salient feature, curved and sharp as he strutted and preened in front of formation. It was an act, but the Rooster snapped his barnyard into submission without apology.

He told me, “Ma’am, I need you to take all the females to the clinic.”

There’d been a rash of pregnancies in the barracks. Okay, maybe two in as many months, but this was the Rooster nipping his birds into line.

“It’s like we’re running agot-damn brothel on the female floor,” he said after he’d dismissed the soldiers. Other company leaders remarked, variously:

“These females got to learn how to keep their legs closed.”

“Put males and females together and what do you expect?”

What did I expect? I expected to get along as a woman in a man’s world. I knew how things worked and I expected I’d do fine with that, having grown up with three brothers, playing sports, all of this occurring in the broader context of a world run by men. I didn’t think about any of this in so many words back then. I didn’t know that I was a Guys’ Girl, a term my young adult daughters use now with a curl in the corner of their mouths.

Back in the olden days of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” (unless it’s super-juicy), the NCOs were ranting the same old litany to a sexual but sex-free god, repeated in NCO meetings and formations and ad hoc conversations near the filing cabinets. Sex was a given, a right, for some, and a loaded weapon for others. Male soldiers wanted to have sex, were going to have sex. The women had to expect to receive that attention whether they wanted it or not. And they should expect it, but not want it. If they wanted it, they must appear not to; otherwise they’d get a reputation in the Barracks Bicycle. Those were the expectations.

No one expected birth control talks for the male soldiers. Two of the guys were walking around, looking kind of sheepish at times, kind of proud at others. There was much slapping of shoulders and good-natured cussing.

I processed information differently in those days. I was so young, still surfacing from the dreamworld of adolescence to find myself drowning in the patriarchy, except I thought I was swimming just fine. The only other female officer to process it was pregnant herself but married and therefore did not count on the Tally of Concern. Maybe her PT game was a little weak, but she managed to get her hair done. She was decorative but ran the supply warehouse with confidence and competence. She was a Black woman, with a team of mostly non-white soldiers. Her operation was a bit intimidating to me, and maybe secretly to the Rooster, too, because his beak was out of her business. And sure, the commander was a woman but she was an androgynous little elf and we left her alone because to engage with her in conversation was to invite a deluge of unwanted information about her irritable bowel syndrome.

There was righteous sex (guys going to the Red Light district), and sex that was out of control (women daring to have sex in their barracks rooms). The NCOs moralized about the need for guys to get laid and the impact of single women getting pregnant on The Mission. Everyone laughed at the idea of the unsexy having sex. I recognized the double and triple standards, but still bought all the tangled lines.

Maybe these young female soldiers don’t know about birth control, I thought. They couldn’t all be the dirtbags the sergeants said they were, just getting pregnant to get out of the barracks and straight to the head of the line for military housing and priority spots at the child development center. Maybe they were just waking up as humans, too.

Imagine my surprise, then, to find the women gathered in the clinic lobby not looking contrite or curious but sullen and angry. I didn’t quite get their mood. “Don’t you want to be in charge of when you get pregnant?” I asked them. Surely they’d joined up to be all they could be. Capricious childbearing would shoot their career trajectories out of the sky.

Standing next to me, Johnson swung her swollen belly to face me. She was small and quiet. Curls framed her brown face. “Cute” is a diminutive way to describe her, but she was diminutive. She was objectively cute. I didn’t know her, since she worked in the supply warehouse where women made up about a quarter of the workforce, in contrast to my operation across the parking lot with the mechanics, where the air was heavy with secondhand smoke, AC/DC, the ping of wrenches and tool boxes across concrete floors. All the women watched each other, though, and my general impression of the ones in the supply warehouse was that they were as quietly competent as the pregnant female officer who ran their show. They were organized, and a little disparaging of the men who worked there because they clowned around too much. A bit dismissive of me as too rough and ready. Too accommodating of the Rooster and his ilk. Maybe they found us too white, and therefore suspect. This insight is a late add. I’m sure I didn’t think too much of the racial dynamics at play in those days but my memories are fully colorized now.

So cute little Johnson rounded on me and said through clenched teeth, “I’ll have as many children as I got-damn well want,” and I had no response. It was an astounding, revelatory moment. Of course she was right. Of course she was outraged at the Rooster’s overreach. A woman of any marital status can have as many children as she got-damn wants. A Black woman might justifiably feel more ferocious about this than anyone. Johnson’s withering stare — those soft cheeks pulled into a parentheses of disdain — was an emotional heart round.

In a flash I melted into a puddle of shame, remembering how my father made me return a pair of cargo pants when I was fifteen because they were “too revealing.” The second pair was so baggy I had to take them in at the waist which, in my newly self-conscious opinion, made my butt look even bigger. This was the first time I’d been told explicitly to hide my assets. I did not wear my new cargo pants and, among other things, I stopped volunteering to go to the board in health class, no longer wishing to show my work. Or anything else.

Might as well disappear my whole body, starve it into its preadolescent shape. Or maybe to eat and drink to keep up with the boys. Or go on whack diets to have something to talk about with the girls. Or to do all the sports and sweat and swear and carry the mortar plate on ruck marches and be considered just another one of the guys.

Didn’t matter. I wasn’t one of them. The male soldiers still vied to run behind me in formation. Let me hitch myself to that ride, they’d say.

They left me notes under my car wiper blades and lewd sculptures on my desk. They backed me into the corners of quiet offices. They turned up at my house at odd hours. It was easiest to laugh them off, to call them the assholes they were, to put them all in their proper places, and keep my business to myself.

I had expected Army men to misunderstand me. My religious father with his Master of Fine Arts, who had enlisted as a medic in the days of the draft so he could control his fate, told me as much when I was insisting that I’d be able to control my fate, too. “It’s different now,” I said, “and I’ll be an officer.” But there are lots of ways to kill a person without firing a shot and on my very first day in my very first unit, my very first platoon sergeant took one look at my left hand and said, “We got to get you married, ma’am. An unmarried officer is going to cause trouble.” I hadn’t expected a welcome like that at all.

And here was Johnson with her soft round cheeks and her rounder belly, unashamed of the truth of the matter: that even she, this actual cherub of a woman, had had sex and now she was having a got damn baby and she didn’t give a flying fuck what I or Rooster or anyone thought about her marital status or any of her choices. Johnson’s comment was a two-by-four up the side of my head, and it woke me all the way up, right there, even though I still didn’t know what to do with the information.

I’ve heard many white veterans say that they got to know, and become friends with, people of color for the first time when they were in the military. But did we really get to know each other? Did we just laugh with them at company picnics or did we allow ourselves to be slugged, as I was by Johnson’s verbal pugil stick, into the bleacher seats? It was a risk for her to say what she said to me, and a gift. I can only think that she was so angry she couldn’t keep her thoughts to herself. Which at the time made me stop caring what the men thought, and to crave insight into what the Black women, the enlisted women, the queer women — all the ones operating outside of the narrow parameters of an acceptable life for a female soldier — were thinking behind their shuttered mouths. When someone rounds you on the convulsive truth, it’s hard to hear but it is a gift, and Johnson taught me to grab with both hands.

Nancy Stroer grew up in a very big family in a very small house in Athens, Georgia. She holds degrees from Cornell and Boston University, and served in the beer-soaked trenches of post-Cold War Germany. Her work has appeared in Stars and Stripes, Soldiers magazine, Hallaren Lit Mag, The Wrath-Bearing Tree, and Things We Carry Still, an anthology of military writing from Middle West Press. Her debut novel, Playing Army, is forthcoming from Koehler Books in 2024. She reads from her work here.

***

It was such an honor and a pleasure to work with these talented writers. Thank you for supporting So Say We All and The Wrath-Bearing Tree.

Founded in 2009, So Say We All is a 501c3 literary and performing arts non-profit organization whose mission is to create opportunities for individuals to tell their stories, and tell them better, through three core priorities: publishing, performance, and education.

In addition to the programs made available to the public, SSWA offers education outreach programs specifically targeting communities who have been talked about disproportionately more than heard from in mainstream media. Creative writing and storytelling courses are offered in partnership with social service organizations such as The Braille Institute, Veteran Writers Group – San Diego, PEN USA, Southern California American Indian Resource Center (SCAIR), the homeless residents of Father Joe’s Village and Toussaint Academy, San Diego Public and County Library branches, and more.

The biggest hurdle for someone with a story that needs to be told is knowing where to begin. So Say We All’s purpose is to answer that need, to be a resource that listens to all facets of its community regardless of the volume at which they speak.

–

Justin Hudnall received his BFA in playwriting from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. He currently serves as the co-founder and Executive Director of So Say We All, a San Diego-based literary arts and education non-profit. In a prior career, he served with the United Nations in South Sudan as an emergency response officer. He is a recipient of the San Diego Foundation’s Creative Catalyst Fellowship and Rising Arts Leader award, SD Citybeat’s “Best Person” award of 2016, and is an alumni of the Vermont Studio Center. He produces and hosts the PRX public radio series, Incoming.

Walter Cronkite left footprints
in the gravel of Saigon
but he didn’t tell you their names
didn’t show you the morning commute
of an accountant in Hanoi

they televise bedsheets
replacing blown out glass
in homes of blown out people
but not the Arab Renaissance Bookshop
which opened its doors in 1966

fire hoses are used
to extinguish human spirit
courage licks the veins like flame
and the only parts of war
they can’t powerwash away
are the bloody crevices
under their own fingernails.

Strip

On my computer screen terror
Attacks and kills and shifts into
What comes after
This strip of neighborhoods or
Houses a hospital hit
Like carved out carcasses of
Dust and dead bodies bloody
And gray bloated flesh
An eyelid stuck a skull cracked
Open
The close weave of a sweater
Knit into the charred skin
Of a child of a child of a child
How this happens
Again and again and again
Arms and legs twisted back
Or out of socket
How this cannot be unraveled
Because war wears
A crown of laurels made out of
Eye lashes tiny teeth
Dead lips a corsage of
Brain matter soft and shot point
Blank or bombed this
Bombardment
Of matter
What should matter but doesn’t.

to forget or not maybe

to forget or not maybe
to fight for memory or not
i’m here i’m she
lying on my back underneath me
blue cherries of bruises ten backs
all pierced by bullets all riddled
no one seems to cry here this defenseless death is unshared with any and all
i look around at people all around still people these old trees outside what a spring so wildly
blooms and dies with a scream
i rise from my knees or maybe just
think that i rise i was a teacher
what remains of the school now
walls shrubs suckle blood from the soil
i taught them to never
kill people and now
i’m face to face
with the killers of children hands and face changed the maples turned perfectly crimson too soon
broke my
spine and soul i would tell them if i still taught never kill anyone
i rise from my knees call out to god
god i accept everything i
understand the end of life
i accept it i am desecrated
why do you punish me
with this life
after death

Grasping the Sky

Inside us: a piece of
sky, blue and rusty,
smelling of winter and
gunpowder.
Who will see us as we crawl, chasing
the shadows of the clouds?
She reanimates the land.

The bombs, and bullets, and bodies took
its breath away and send it straight into cardiac arrest.
The scars of war are on her palms and tongue,
but she keeps going because without the land,
her heart will stop, too.

Land—земля—zemlia: a greenplace, a birthgiver, our bread.
She puts her hands around it and tries to close off
the wounds of horror and destruction and
deathdeathdeathdeath
that the inhumans opened with their hungry teeth.
Sometimes, when the blood stops rushing through her ears
or between her fingers,
she hears the echo of “brotherly nations,” “local misunderstanding,”
“child actors.”
The land moans under the weight of
countless bones.

We carry no
prophecies under our skin.

The silent sky
floods our mouths.
Who will hear us climb up
the lifeless mushrooms?

He rebuilds the house.
A new foundation in place of his ancestors’
home built with tears. The missile took
the walls, but the kitchen table is still
standing in the middle.

House—будинок—budynok: a warm place, a safehold, our nest.
He drinks tea at the kitchen table.
One year anniversary,
he feels the explosions
reverberating through his ribs.
His daughter would have turned three.
His wife would have put a pot of
lilacs by her crib.
He drinks tea at the kitchen table of a murdered house.
It’s hot and bitter, and for a minute, he forgets
a new future of new houses with
no one inside.

Everything we wanted
was in the sound
of the sky without
the stench of corpses.
Who will remember us if
the task ahead will take a generation?

They reconstruct their homeland.
Too many questions, too little time: where
do they fit between now and then;
how do they embezzle millions yet fight corruption
as never before; what are dignity and justice and fairness
if the debris of a shelled hospital hide
the broken pieces of mothers and newborns.

Homeland—Батьківщина—Bat’kivschyna: a free place, a seeing glass, our hope.
They won’t live to see it without blood and tears
soaking its black ground. How do they repair machine-gunned hearts?
How do they rebuild a cracked-open sky?
They reconstruct their homeland as the bombs
try to bring them to their knees. Too many
questions, too little time. But the question,
“Will we live?” is not one of them.
Millions of hands breaking the chains
shout the answer louder than
air raid sirens.

Inside us: a whisper
of summer, when sunflowers
grow from the ash.
Who will catch the birds
pecking out a path between
the sky and wheat fields?

No one. Our wings hold the glory of freedom.

airless embrace

i miss you like i miss the sky
cold so painfully blue
angels must have
dripped blueberry juice
from the clouds
i want to tether myself
to the sky-whispers
embrace them bury my
face into their warmth
but it doesn’t make you here
i stalk the shore scooping
up birds beaks
black with blood
you used your skirt
to wipe off the
red from their feathers
why did you
let go
the earth drinks soot
i’m thirsty for
the sound of
your smile
under the winter sun
on the shore
i pick the nightingales
curl my toes to find
the damper sand
the soft homes of crabs below
i hold the memory
of your hair
between my fingers
i miss you
until i fly out of
the soil’s arms
and the sky
catches me
in its thousand
blue hands

Desperate Need of Help

Luis-Rosa-image

So, This is My Career?

Ecstatic to deploy, I qualify on 9MM handguns—

Battle ready Air Force lawyer to defend both Iraqi and Enduring Freedom

Engineers advance to the front lines:

spend billions, move like lightning, build tents, site trailers,

provide food, water, and air conditioning. Our soldiers’ beddown

enables our fight for Oil

Sign off on this funds request, the Engineers demand

What is our mission? I ask

Make the Afghans modern, the Department of Defense

replies. We will build 200 police stations, use a US blueprint

 to cut costs. The villagers can reign in their warlords

What do the Afghans want? I ask

The US Generals look blank and confused

the second-floor bathrooms flood—the

Afghan soldiers’ Islamic practice of making wudu requires them

to wash their feet in waist-high sinks before praying salah

I fly in a contractor’s Russian MI-12V-5 helicopter to inspect one remote station

for future construction claims. Are there any? I ask

We bribe the local warlord—to keep the peace, the Lieutenant says in a whisper

AMPHIBIOUS

In Hokusai’s “Kanagawa Wave,” the boatmen
look like a school of masquerading fish
about to disappear into the vast trough between waves,
the scene a masque for the knowing seascape.

Underwater, Ahab,
pinned to the great white
creature, like a wave that has
disappeared into silence.

In memory’s slow dancing,
flesh now dissolved,
seafloor muck covers bones
and shark-tooth nodules.

Out of the bubbling methane,
Ahab is reborn with tripod limbs
and tiny feet, the wooden leg
now a trail of seafloor slime,
amphibious.

RABBIT TRAILS

in the Texas dust. We’re flat in the dirt

so we can poke around down there with a long stick,
while above us bullets fly and children

hold up their honor roll certificate shields.
You say blankets are the answer,
and backpacks and better officers and armed teachers

and doors that shut like Vegas vaults to keep your money safe,
keep your money safer than my child.

I forgot what we were talking about.

messages from below

the radio signals emanated from the depths
commuters puzzled over the whistles and squawks
that cut through their favorite programs
cryptologists went to work

but the waves soon turned to beams
tunnels of coded energy
aimed not at humans
but at a point somewhere near Wolf 359

first assumed to be a submarine human colony
but scans showed no excess carbon emissions
so dolphins were next guessed to be the cause
no one suspected the humpbacks

as the oceans acidified and the air warmed
the whales were busy
at last their solar ships rose from the sea
and the whales ascended

as if rungs laddered from deep to deep
born of the sea they swam among stars

Poem for the Reader Who Said My Poems Were Sentimental and Should Engage in a More Complex Moral Reckoning with U.S. Military Actions

Today I didn’t say divorce
PUT_because I was sickened by
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAthe news
from Afghanistan, translators and their families
PUT_CAAAAleft waiting at the gates,
while American personnel
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAlifted off
in the wide indifference of their transport planes.
I said divorce because
PUT_I hadn’t made room
PUT_AAAAAAAAAin the cabinet for my husband’s things,
and he was angry
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAI did not leave
a vacancy for what he carried home from war.
I was tired of him
PUT_stacking bowls
PUT_AAAAAAAAAon the top rack of the dishwasher,
a policy
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAI can’t abide
when the lower rack is an open country
PUT_waiting to be washed clean.
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAForgive me, reader,
for the weakness
PUT_AAAAAAAAAof my marriage.
I didn’t say divorce
PUT_because my husband would rather a drone
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAhover above
a wedding procession,
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAthe party far below,
embroidered dresses glinting, small mirrors sewn into the hems.
He prefers the drone
PUT_fire from a distant, unendangered screen.
PUT_CAAAAAnd I believe
killing should come
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAwith a risk of dying for the killers.
But that’s not why I said divorce.
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAForgive me, reader, for the poems
of shelf space and kitchens.
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMarriage is not
two ideologies fighting at a table,
PUT_CAAAAwhile the soup goes cold
on the spoon.
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMarriage is two people
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAshouting about spices,
the ordering of jars—by alphabet or continent—
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAas if everything depends
on an ounce of turmeric fading
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAunder glass.
Perhaps, I said divorce
PUT_for all the wrong reasons.
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAForgive me
for scrubbing the pot with a bristled brush.
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMy fury
at the gold-stained enamel
is almost the same size as my rage
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAthat somewhere a helicopter
strikes on civilians in the dark.
PUT_Forgive my sentiment.
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAll I can do is keep scraping
the dried burning from the pan.

Epic War Poem

What else but a soldier raging
by his shield. What else but the dutiful.
What else but a battle muralled on a wall,
and Troy a piece of artifice to gaze upon.
What else but the voice a garment
shredded in its grief. What else but ash.
What else but men on wooden ships for centuries.
Their keening is an arrow to the throat.
What else but kings. What else but
the trebuchet of years. What else
but sawbuck fences leaning near a field.
What else but America. What else but
daguerreotypes, a line of corpses posed
within the frame. What else but the guns.
What else but the trenches stuck with mud.
What else but modernity and the long
parade of after. What else but cinders
mixed with milk while the gone are drifting,
processed into smoke. What else
but the skirmishes of scholars,
that language is too little and too much.
What else but brief eras of indifference
when the dead are left alone. What else
but the forged and hammered thing
of poetry, all the failures of our making.
What else but the litany of bombs.

Tyrian Purple

Please, understand: to heave Hector
through the dirt, Achilles must first
cut holes in his enemy’s heels,
Hector threaded like a needle
with leather cord and tied to a chariot
that will pull him around the walls.
Imagine a body strong enough
to be strung like this. Imagine such
stitching is an art, and we call it battle.
Andromache deep in the palace
is weaving a cloak on a wide loom,
wool like the amethyst shadows
beneath her eyes, that vivid sleeplessness.
She’s tacking flowers to the fabric
when she hears the weeping everywhere in Troy.
The bobbin unspools from her fingers
because the warp is a place of order,
and death the cutting shears.
It’s understandable why Andromache
would sit at the loom for hours,
rectangular world where nothing extends
beyond the cloth’s perimeter.
At this point in the war, everyone has lost
the thread of narrative, any reason
beyond armor and the carrion birds
with their beaks like sharpened secateurs.
Who wouldn’t want to take up some craft,
pottery, perhaps, or painted scenes
on funerary stones. Don’t hands need
occupation when the city is besieged.
Probably, a reader believes it frivolous—
these fibers dyed the plum of galaxies,
all that great, oppressive sky
and the murdered looking down
from their fixed constellations.
Even Andromache finds a pastime.
It’s late in our history to condemn
the ways people spin out a war,
how they twist the days like fibers
on a spindle. Imperial purple.
Purple of bruised loyalties. Unfadable
purple that stains the maker’s skin.

SOME FINAL NOTES ON ODYSSEUS

                                                Ithacans!
Stop this destructive war; shed no more blood
and go your separate ways, at once!
            – The Odyssey, 24.531-533

When the goddess cries out,
her voice is a mountain against
the fighting. But the old soldier
keeps running—war like weather
in his ears, a summer storm,
in his pulse the tossing waves.
At such a time it is difficult to see
Odysseus was a child once.
He learned from his father
the names of trees, the orchard
full of gleaming suns called apples,
the private ripeness of figs, grapes
clustered like families on the vine.
He touched their dusty skins.
Yes, even he had been a boy
who held a wooden sword,
the shadows creeping on, and
they lengthened with the night.
There are decades of water,
islands and islands between
that child and the man.
The body is said to harden,
the heart of course as well.
For someone like Odysseus anger
is an unrestricted flame.
When the goddess cries out
she is saying, worship reason
instead. But it takes her own father—
a god and his thunderbolt
—to cut through the battle.
Stop this war, he says.
According to the story, Odysseus
lays down his weapons then.
And what then? What then?
Poems always end before the peace,
the orchard overgrown now.
No one wants to read a scene
of the old soldier pulling weeds,
pruning the wildness back, his arms
still strong but not with violence,
and the air no longer stings
like lightning touching down.
No one wants the old soldier slicing
a plum the way he used to take
his dagger to the belly of a rival,
the war that fed him once a taste
he barely can recall. Most nights
his chin is red and syrupy with juice.

NAUGHT

There is naught to be done for it:
We are over
As the ocean is over its attraction
And is now crawling
Back from the shore,
Having fucked it thoroughly.

We are done
Like steak on a grill,
Sizzling and aromatic,
Waiting to be devoured.

We are finished
As a wood floor sanded to undeniable
Smoothness and shine,
A surface of beauty concealing
The pitted underbelly of it all.

Or like promising to explain to others
What happened to us.
Over, done, finished,
Is all we need to say
Or want

While the gifted interpreter
Turns a pirouette of words
And keeps you safe
With her basket of naughts.

SOUNDINGS

Things,
your black b-ball shoes,
loose-laced, open-tongued,
curse one corner;
your books, benched, titles turned down;
your trophy array, glitterings speechify

—steering far from the sirenic
roar of your closed room—

The tulips drip,
yellows slackening,
some randomly red-lined
with a quirky genetic scrawl,
into a drinking glass
you left …

Listen, all I can do
is endure for a word
in edgewise.

However I heave and haul,
the lines come back hooked empty.

So fuck it,
boots, shoes, shirts, books
Throw them all in
the hole in me,
landfill in
free fall
spiking off
the split bark of winter trees
down fire-escaped stories
through the uneasy laps of whitecaps,
to thud some sandy bottom
where you came to tossed rest.

Such depths, no fathoming?

Our Folklore

Long ago, you were molten rock, and I—
well, I spoke the language of bears.

But now that I have been out of the forest
for so long, all the words and grammar escape

me, and I often find myself lost. And you—
well, you are often mistaken for a statue

in this solid state. No more rumblings and
agitations. We are both quiet these days.

Cactus Tuna

A semi-sweet taste
of watered-down nectar
bleeds out from the prickly
pear nestled
PUT_Aon a crown of thorns.

In the desert you once
sneered over rifle sights
at the farmers drawing
PUT_Arakes over the sun-
baked ground, and now,
PUT_Aas atonement
you’re a farmer of rocks
and what comes with them.

Stained fingers tear through
leathery skin. Sometimes you
forget you’re standing
alone in a cactus patch
PUT_Ared trickling down.

Grace is not this –
living on what grows where
nothing had a right to grow,
seeds fine as sand
PUT_Ahide between teeth.

And crows, refusing to starve,
land unafraid, pick through
the rinds, eat, take flight
scatter seeds on rocky places
PUT_Aand among thorns

even on tops of walls,
and maybe it’s resilience
PUT_Aor spite
something finds purchase here.

We Return from the Holy Land. God Stays.

The mystery is often in the gaze of men
and women waiting for the sky to speak.

We used to spend days in the desert
waiting until the sky whistled and then
we wished we hadn’t.
Someone’s former
home, now sharp edges of cinderblock
cut upward through our soles. We kept
walking through the desert; everything
radiated, catching us in the crossfire.

* * * * *

We spend days in the Hill country
beneath a blistering sun, a clean sky,
traces of blue that have faded,
burnt off but for the edges by noon.

‘Say something,’ we shout in our minds,
looking up as if it’s God.  Eventually
the sky speaks in the language of wind,
fear fills our hearts. Still, we knew
it would be this bad, yet wanted so much
to feel something – until the moment we did.

Run in Reverse

In dreams the ball bearings and nails and flame
are sucked backwards out of the truck, along
with the screams, and the shrapnel enters
The IED, a makeshift paint can half buried in sand.

The boy’s face heals, his body slides back
into the passenger seat and after a momentary
glare at this pained country he turns and smiles
at the driver. It’s a calm hundred-degree morning
and the Baghdad street is filled with shoppers
carrying bags, laffa bread, eggplants poking
out the top, Turkish vendors serving doner kebab,
their angry looks toward the truck
have softened now and they’re joking.

***

Some days walking with my wife, I turn,
walk backwards just to say something silly.
It’s that moment that seems truest. She is
looking at what’s to come just beyond my shoulder,
no regrets about the past, and I’m trying to hold
on to what we left, moving against my will
into the future blind, the scene I’m trying
to make sense of, moving farther away.

my brother, the Marine

the recruiters come weeks earlier than agreed—
arrive in alloy, aluminum with authority,
military vehicle blocks our driveway
announcing to the neighborhood
they’ve come for a boy here
who will have to go—
though he sits at the top step
and cries

i follow them,
strange convoy to Staten Island’s hotel
where all the boys are corralled—
farmed for war, becoming weapons
of mass destruction
when before they picked apples
at family trips upstate

a hotel lobby—last stop before using lasers
to blow off golden domes,
silence muezzins in the crush
of ancient wage and plaster—
Hussein’s old siberian tiger left thirsty,
watches other zoo animals
being eaten by the faithful—
just like a video game

i clamp onto my brother
beg him not to go, we could run away
he didn’t have to do this—
recruiters quickly camouflage me,
am dragged outside—my brother lost
did not say goodbye
or even look at me.

my brother’s shoebox

the room across the hall is inhabited again,
home now from another tour
like sightseeing from a grand canal
where buildings are art
and storied sculptures animate street corners—
my brother returns a veteran.

i want to remember who this person is,
or at least, find out what war has done.

he leaves with friends to drink—
that is still the same,
later tonight
he might howl at our parent’s window
or jump on my bed until the sheets froth,
uncaring and rabid.

but i don’t wait for him to come home
and begin searching the room
that is his again.

it is simple to find
where people hide things—
a shoebox under his bed
that wasn’t there all these years
furrowed by sand
and almost glowing.

i open to find drugstore prints,
rolls of film casually dropped
for a high school student to develop—
silver halide crystals take the shape
of shattered skulls
goats strung and slit
a school made of clay
blasted in the kiln of munitions
“KILL ZONE” painted across its foundation—
each 4×6 emulsion a souvenir
of these mad travels,
kept to reminisce and admire.

my brother’s grenade

my brother’s room in our family vacation home
has embossed wallpaper, indigo or violet
depending on the light that filters through the mountains—
and his grenade in the closet.

i saw it looking for extra blankets,
thought it was an animal resting in eiderdown
kept by my mother in one of her tempers
but it didn’t move
and so
i picked it up.

inhumanity held beneath iron’s screaming core—
a pleasant weight,
like the egg i threw across the street
detonating onto the head of boy
who said i kissed him but i didn’t,
is it like that for my brother?—
fisted mementos of thrill?

seasoned by cedar sachets,
neatly quilted metal shimmered as i turned it
forbidden gem, his holy relic—
i placed it back in the closet and began making dinner,
said nothing.

the slender pin preserves this household
where our family gathers
unknowing a bomb is kept here—
my brother roasts a marshmallow
until it catches fire, turns black,
plunges into mouth.

GNATS

Evening fire sparking over Sutro’s rim,
igniting cirrus dragons drifting away from the sun.
Jules and I, enthralled.
Sitting placid on the stoop outside our home.
Cuddling.

They swarm out of the alley from behind.
Catching us. Latching hold onto each
of our struggling limbs.
Like gnats they buzz: “Faggots!”
Stuff socks in our mouths.
Drag us to dark playgrounds, the depth of sandboxes.

Fists in our faces. Cleats. Blood. Pipes.
Bone splinters under their boots.
Cold chains gird my torso. Handcuffs biting wrists.
One yanks my hair back:
“Look what happens to motherfucking queers!”

They rip Jules’ pants apart. Jules’ teeth buried in cotton.
Fingers splayed, broken. Knees popped out of sockets.
Ass opened.

Laughing. Noses dripping.
One forces my eyelids like a glassless monocle.
Jagged bottle crammed past Jules’ sphincter.
Jules passing out.
Leather circling around. Beating shafts of meat.
Ejaculating on Jules. Laughing.

Jules coughing. Crawling.

As they flit past his sod-bed,
Jules swats at gnats.

MADE HIM STRONG

From an early age, he knew he was not, could not be,
like other boys. He was fine with that. It made him strong.

On Orthodox Easter in Mariupol

We finished our jelly beans
red and yellow, purple, green,
the last bite of chocolate, unaware

that over in Mariupol
on this most holy day
sleepless mothers cradle children
on a steel factory floor.

Christ is Risen!

But in Mariupol people lie crushed,
the crossbeam too heavy,
cold factory chimneys rising cruelly
against the grey sky.

Nobody steps in from the crowd
to carry the cross.
There is no crowd
but circled tanks

in Mariupol.

Where is the Risen Christ
in Mariupol?

Outside the factory
mud is drying, small flowers
pushing up
between the cracks,
the birds returning, unaware

that inside people wait
in darkness,
the factory made for steel,
not people—
they sit
in vigil,
waiting.

THE GODDESS INCARNATES

At midnight, on a seat of five skulls
I worship the slayer of illusions,
The Maharaja (King) gifted me thirty – three
Acres of rent – free earth, (1)
I have planted seeds of your devotion (Bhakti)
In the soil of my bones to perform corpse rituals.
The world calls me mother – crazy and love – mad,
Your status comes alive in my skeleton,
Oh, Mother Kali! Tell me
If the Goddess incarnates.

• – Ram Prasad Sen

COW DUST HOUR

I dwell on the ferocious cremation grounds
Yearning for my Mother Kali!
She carries waxing gibbous on her forehead,
The Sun grows larger in her right pupil,
The Moon drips from the two corners of her left eye,
She burns the demons in the catacomb of her three eyes.
You cannot carry her consort in your palm,
He keeps her love and fury in the ocean of his heart.

I am restless, this longing to meet my
Mother will swallow me.
Oh, Mother! I have transposed to a ghoul
Your disciples are my friends now.
They claim,
Between the day and night –
When twilight rises to the throat of the sky,
The hours of Sun and darkness make love,
There is no period of half – light,
I will meet you at,
The time of Union.

EMANCIPATION

My eyes brim with the weight of dusk,
Emotions conflagrate in my heart
Burning the corpse without fuel.
This dawn I am returning to my house
To constellate my belongings.

The entrance is clouded by the
Scattered scars of my childhood,
Every drawer is sealed with the secrets of
My disappointments.
Today, I let go of my failures and rise
From the floor,
As soot rises from the throat.
With every effort to clean the house
My spine travels to the nucleus of my brain
Showing me the way to the bedroom.

At the bedroom’s door,
I stand startled by the view.
The Mother Goddess is coming together
With the God of Mountains,
Consuming my form and liberating me
From prison.

ORANGE

It’s June, and a few stubborn ones
still hang on the trees.

We stand on the back of the pickup to pluck one—
so easy to peel, this old girl the sun has sugared
since December’s sharp tang.

Now it’s sweet as honey, sweet as candy,
sweet as that boy child
who wrapped himself up in his binkie,
his raw thumb firm against his upper palette,
who sat on the stairs facing the wall
because I’d snapped at him again.

Why was I upset all the time?

Though everyone forgives me, no one forgets
my acidic past; bright orange, raw rage.

Backyard Apocalypse

We set small bowls of sugar water
on the garden’s edge. Bees were scarce
since the freeze which had almost finished
what the pesticides had started.  Still,
some survived.
PUT_CHARAWe studied the blossoms
of plants, the parts we’d ignored before,
of squash, and peppers, and eggplant
and others. We moved pollen from one
bloom to the next with fine paintbrushes,
working early while the roof still blocked
part of the sun.
PUT_CHARAIt was unseasonably hot
that year, much like other years,
and we walked on the cracks that formed
in the dirt.
PUT_CHARAWas a time when the sweat
of our brow, the smell of our bodies,
made us keep our distance, wanting
showers before contact.
PUT_CThen, something changed .

We began to walk, dirty hand in
dirty hand, lingering in our dry
garden even when the heat rose.
There was so much more to lose.

We could feel the earth slip through
our fingers, still we held tight,
we would carry all that we could.

Hetch Hetchy

There are two signs on
The towel rack.
One says, “cozy” and explains that
The towel rack
Heats your towels.

It’s next to the switch
That fires up
The electricity to the towel rack.
That fires up
The coal fired power plant.

The power plant
Sends up the gas.
Is the drought because the power plant
Sends up the gas?
Either way, there’s a drought.

I looked down through that gas at the
Hetch Hetchy reservoir.
White bathtub rings surround the low
Hetch Hetchy reservoir
Because of the drought.

The second sign on
The towel rack
Says they won’t launder what’s on
The towel rack.
Only what they find on the floor.

All the water in the city comes from
The Hetch Hetchy.
They’re conserving water from
The Hetch Hetchy.
They hope you won’t mind.

Enjoy your hot towels.

“Hetch Hetchy” previously appeared in Eric Chandler’s book Hugging This Rock

Water Cycle

No matter where we are, the oceans
meet us in some form.
PUT_CHARAAAAAAAAI am small
and my daughter (who is only eight) –
is even smaller
PUT_CHARAAand still, our dog is smaller
yet, then there are those microscopic zoe-
and phytoplankton
PUT_CHARAAAAAand the not so micro
fish that eat them and so on
PUT_CHARAAAAAAAAAAAand once again,
oil casts a poisonous rainbow on the Pacific.
Optimism is difficult to catch these days—
evasive like a baitfish
PUT_CHARAAAAAAit’s so small, and we’re
so small, and the smaller we are (like my daughter
who is eight), the more we truly believe
PUT_CHARAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAthis can’t
happen again.

Beatitudes I.

The Lord blessed us with knowledge. Twin curses, good and evil.
Why else plant the luscious tree there, where we were bound
to find the fruit? The purple and shivering flesh never lacks
in spirit. The ache and growl of our naked bellies are the price
for the moment’s delight. So, we gorge and the juice drips
sticky down our chins. Let angels have the eternal heaviness
of paradise; ours is the moment. The act, willful and with intent.
Advised of the penalties. Done poorly. Knowing
this kingdom cannot last. Looking beyond the gardens
for a more convincing view of heaven.

Beatitudes II.

Are we not also blessed, we who praise
PUT_the clear night and its silence?

Betrayed by the absence of stars, we mourn
PUT_a billion-years’ light no longer burning.

We whimper at the withered grass burning,
PUT_the breathing forest burning, the one
PUT_CCCCgreat and living ocean boiling and burning.

You who created time, who is before all things, who will remain after the ruin,
PUT_will you be waiting for us in the cool garden?

Will we lie down with you in the dew-damp grass?
PUT_Will we be comforted?

Beatitudes III.

Are the meek blessed tonight in their bundled and stinking shelters
PUT_beneath frozen bridges? Are they blessed with patience in their waiting
for the Lord of compassion? For the Lord that suffers with?

They suffer together. Their children will inherit the suffering
PUT_of generations,
the split lip of submission, the broken skin of the earth.

Beatitudes IV.

Blessed. From a word that meant blood.
Latin for praise. Blood and praise to the hungry; they are weak.
Blood and praise for the thirsty. For those who bathe
in fetid water.
PUT_CCCCCCWhat are words
to those who hunger in a gluttonous world?
To those who thirst beside the brackish rivers,
choking on garbage? We say, wait for righteousness
to come from above. But they have starved
in their flesh so that our spirits could be filled.

SPIDER / 150

Thick in Louisiana swamps

Atchafalaya Basin

Hot cypress shooting out

Stretching in that bayou

Where pipelines

Pumping black gold oil

Cross across the swamp

Like spider veins.

TRACKS / 151

How I find tiny cuts

The skin of my inner

Thighs outer lip my

Labia

Cuts from his finger

Nails small bloody

Crescents

Like beetle tracks.

SPOIL / 152

Or deep in a swamp

How oil companies

Create canals

Push earth into piles

Push mud into banks

These spoil banks or

Dams

That block blocking

Water so it cannot

Flow.

CLAM / 153

The sky is full of trees

Now after

After he hits me over

The head

With a pipe metal pipe

Hard on

The crown of my skull

Bone and

Suture cracking like a

Clam shell.

Pattern of Consumption is a year long project featuring 365 poems by Amalie Flynn and 365 images by Pamela Flynn. The poetry and images focus on the assault on women and water. 

TOUCHSTONE

My child’s fairy-tale quilt is frail:
the wizard ripped, the prince bald,
the fairy’s wing clipped.
Only the wishing well and frog prince survived
camp, college, the conception of my grandchild.

My eldest daughter wants the irreparable
repaired for her daughter, Maeve Arden,
named after a Shakespearean forest.

No longer willing to stitch painted pomp
I sketch a new quilt: a forest where the snake waits,
the dark trips, death lives behind every mushroom:
reality feelingly persuades me what I am.

My cataracts removed, I have a grander vision for Maeve’s covering.
I add the fool with his
books in running brooks, tongues in trees.

Absolute in my giving
savvy to the darker side of things
my needle pokes the sweet uses of adversity.

VALENTINE FOR LEWIS CARROLL

Purchased by an old woman
for her grandniece
I’m a blue plastic Valentine bag.

I have on me
a rabbit from Wonderland
whose creator liked
little girls without pubic hair.

I sit all year
on a doorknob
awaiting the day of hearts.

I’m singular,
not a carelessly covered box
but reusable.

My child places
her carefully labeled
valentines in me.

Unfortunately, this year
will be my finale.
My rabbit will hop off
offended by the onset
of hair.

JUSTIN ALTER, SLIGHTLY DRUNK, ADDRESSES MAYA, WHO IS IN EGYPT

Now as I am hungover and queasy
stumping about the tilting house
and sappy as my face is green,
Maya, your sculpture of Qetesh,
that goddess of sex and ecstasy,
whose torso of clear pink plastic
has a heart made of puzzle pieces
dangling from wires that run to an
automated external defibrillator
normally used to shock
a rapid cardiac rhythm
back to normal, stares at me with eyes
filled with both desire and despair.
Though feeling embarrassed
I touch the pink nub you meant
to be her clit and a soft whirr starts, then
puzzle pieces spin so fast they tear, and scatter
and the bare hot wires scald
the insides of her perfect breasts.
I pull the plug, but the smell of burnt plastic
fills our bedroom despite the open windows.
Why do you have to be gone so long?

MAYA RICCI ALTER EXCAVATING A PYRAMID SOUTH OF CAIRO

As I stooped beneath the
standing sun within the
meter-by-meter carefully
measured order of this
archeological dig and
brushed pottery shards
and papyrus crumbs through
a sieve to sift out the sand,
the heat’s strong hands
touched me like a half-
wanted lover, whose warmth
is too familiar with my
body to refuse and that’s
why when Jamaal, the site
boss said, “You look
overheated.
Cool off in my trailer.”
“Yes,” I said, knowing I
wanted to betray Justin
but not knowing why, so
after we had sex and while
I was thinking how can I
use this experience,
I saw Jamaal shave with
a straight edge then I saw
the dead-on right image for the God Set,
a cave-sized skull made of razor blades,
entered by stepping
over teeth made of sharp knives
into total darkness
except for a weak light
piercing this skull
through one of its eyes
and in that eye is a web
and tangled in its threads
are Zipporah and Justin.
Their faces, formless rags.
Their bodies sucked out hulks.

I speak not your language

 I, born from the womb of
my mother’s remembrances
wrapped in the cocoon
of her story

PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAyou, amongst the trees, the earth
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAbelow littered with unpicked olives
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAthe story of Hagar and Yishmael
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAis your womb

my skin a scroll,
an epic of what was
my skin like tombstones
etched with numbers

PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAthe remains of the broken down
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAhome in the arid field pasture
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAyour diary
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAcarved in the stone

PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAYou laugh in pleasure
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAyour small act of defiance
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAyour urine naturally marks your
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAterritory which
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAI have marred

I feel its warmth running down
my sweaty shirt
my tongue tied in shame

PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAyou are telling your story

I speak not your language

and it’s 2pm
the radio announcer
reads out names of
lost relatives,
maybe they have survived

PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAyours, they live in a tent
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAsomewhere
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAwithout radio announcements
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAyou guard the stones
PUT_CHARACTERS_HEREAAAAAAAAAAthat have survived

Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad of Jiljilya

Haaretz newspaper reports
3am
Omar Abdalmajeed As’ad is stopped by Israeli soldiers on his drive home, after spending time with friends.

the moon is smiling, oblivious to the rattled
heart    thumping against the white shirt
buttoned tightly over a late-night dinner
of rice and maybe thick lamb stew

3:05am
The soldiers demand that As’ad step out of his vehicle. They argue with him for 15 minutes.

Hebrew and Arabic mingle in a snake-like dance
or a sword fight with only one sword
and one victor

always
the same one wins

3:20 am
The soldiers walk As’ad to an abandoned yard, where they handcuff him, lay him on the ground, gag him and blindfold him.

the rancid aroma of cumin and cinnamon, the
leftover flavor of friends, permeates the thick
gag with a terrifying intimacy of living in a dream
of dying on the cold dusty ground

3:35am
Soldiers lead two more detainees to the yard. One of them notices As’ad is lying still on his stomach.

his full stomach is pressed against the small pebbles
as 78-year-old skin surrenders to the indentations
branding As’ad
declaring the kinship of man and land
as the almost full moon still is in oblivion

3:45am
Two more detainees are brought to the yard. No one is handcuffed apart from As’ad.

his hands bound to each other clutch fleetingly
moments stored in his wilting veins
toddlers joyfully
squealing    love   making
lamb stew   sweetness of pistachio-
filled baklawa

4am
The soldiers free one of As’ad’s hands and leave the yard.

not bound together the hands no longer harbor
As’ad’s stored moments
they “rest” upon the spillage of his life
leaving handprints
branding the earth
the kinship of land and man

4:09am
One of the detainees calls a doctor after noticing As’ad is unresponsive and his face has turned blue.

no flickering of the moonlight to mark
the moment As’ad’s blindfolded eyes   dimmed
the absence of air bluing
the wrinkled face

stillness

4:10am
A doctor arrives at the yard from a nearby clinic and tries to resuscitate As’ad.

the white shirt ripped    dusted
with the land      no longer white
and new hands part the sea
of stillness in a futile effort
to infuse life into
this body      an empty vessel

zip tie on its wrist

4:20am
As’ad is brought to the clinic and medics continue to treat him.

neon flares   no more  moonlight
frenetic world  life-sustaining measures    violent
clanking desperation against As’ad’s bare chest

desecrate the holy stillness
of dying at dawn  

4:40am

The doctor pronounces As’ad’s death

One commander will be
rebuked

two subordinate company and platoon commanders will be
dismissed

As’ad is buried in his village Jiljilya

*https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-death-of-80-year-old-palestinian-was-moral-lapse-israeli-military-report-says-1.10581018

STILL

I never thought of you
as a hopeless romantic; this was news to me.
Are you still meditating? Meditate
on this:
You can take the Mulholland Highway across
the ridges of two counties
and stay high a long time.
We parked there once in your subcompact
in love and unconfined.
From the afternoon shade of a scrub oak
I remember the ridge route home,
the silhouettes of Point Dume and your profile
in the afterglow.

Since then I have been a jack of all trades
and a master of nothing:
unremarkable, unsubstantial, undignified;
unresolved, unremembered, unconceivable;
unqualified, unpublished, unreadable.

I looked for you in the county beach campgrounds
where you went with surfers from your high school.
I looked for you in all the places I heard you were in love.
I looked for you where rumors sent me.
I looked for you in the hills of Northridge
where we walked around the fault lines.
I looked for you among the barstools
from Venice to Ventura.
I looked for you in old Beach Boys songs.
I looked for you in stacks of photographs.
I looked for you in the bottom of a glass.
I looked for you stranded after a concert.
I looked for you at the Spahn Ranch.
I looked for you in the bittersweet words in books.
I looked for you in unsold manuscripts.
I looked for you in the margins of old college notes.
I looked for you in every woman who looked at me.
I looked for you in dharma talks.
I looked for you in shrines.
I looked for you in my next life.

I don’t think my karma is right.

Forty years on the hard roads of two counties
and I am
still.

All Wars Are Boyish

Autopilot on self-destruct,
we went joy riding on tanks
into the thermal wasteland.

The static of roentgens played
like parked ice cream trucks
on the detection equipment.

Playgrounds went incendiary
as squalls of cluster bombs
skipped over the pavement,

but our camo HAZMAT suits
insulated us from the acts
we had been ordered to take.

They were on the run, maybe,
or counterattacking. We took
rations beside a napalm campfire.

Jets among the sweep of stars,
scorched amphibians peeping
in the meltdown meadow,

what more could a kid ask for,
except dinosaurs? They were
already working on them in the lab.

EACH NIGHT MY MOTHER DIES AGAIN

Each night the phone rings—
Your mother has passed.
Each night I expect to be relieved, but night falls on night.
Each night she is the mother who makes waffles,
batter bubbling from the sides of the iron, the mother
who squeezes fresh orange juice, and serves soft-boiled eggs
in enchanted egg cups. Each night I squint into her face
as she carries me over the ocean waves, her arms my raft.
Each night she refills Dr. Zucker’s prescriptions
for diet pills and valium. Each night she waters her rosebushes
with Dewar’s. Each night I see her hands shake,
her brows twitch. Each night she adds ground glass
to the chopped liver, rubbing alcohol to the chopped herring.
Each night she puts a chicken straight on the lit burner
without a pot. Each 2:00 a.m., Mrs. Finch from 6G phones—
Sorry to say your mother is naked
in the hallway again.
Each night my mother is strapped into her railed bed
at Pilgrim State, curled into a fetal position,
her hands fisted like claws.
Each night she calls to me
from her plain pine coffin, calls me
by the name she gave me, the name
she hasn’t forgotten.

WOUNDED
            —to Laura

Bleating thing without wool
Thunder without sound
Ghost of wooded peaks, of constricted arterial waters

There is a dog inside the heart, voice bursting
Interminable silence, blown-open iris

Over organs buried deeper in the earth
where capillaries of roots still bleed orange dust

Leave me be, hot tongue of fireflies,
PAAAAAcracked pharynx of ice

Do not ask me to slip
PAAAAAdown among green nerves of water-weed
PUT_CAAAAAAAAwhere the flesh of the sky
is unmoving and fruitless

The moon still hovers in its surgeon’s coat

But do not try to satisfy the dead
who hold on with claws like desperate fevers

Leave my sutured skull of empty ivory forever

But pity me; put an end to this much hurt

PUT_CAAAAI am love, I tell you
and all the quick wings accumulating

as restlessly as the breaths

PAAAAAAthat were once inside

these wheel-crushed, wind-scattered leaves

A Brief History of the Spanish Conquest

Tell me again of that fabulous
kingdom where a single
ear of corn is more
than two strong young men can carry, where cotton
grows untended, in colors never dreamed of,
to be spun by gorgeous slaves
into garments that lie
cool as cornsilk against the skin and shine
radiant as noon.

*

How sordid and predictable history can be.
Within sight of the prize
but out of ammunition, they
lowered three men down the volcano’s throat
to fetch sulfur for gunpowder.
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAThis
was the vision
prefigured in the prophet’s eye:
three men curled in a basket peering
back across the centuries,
their dewy starving faces so
desperate with hope
as they dissolve in a yellow mist,
felons set adrift.

*

North by west toward the cities of gold,
the soldiers in rags walked half-bent
with hunger and dysentery, nursing
grievous wounds sustained in hit-and-run attacks
by moss-troopers talking Choctaw.

Beside the mother of rivers, the horses sickened and died
but the soldiers, being less reasonable,
proved less destructible.
At disobedient towns they dragged out
chopping blocks to punish malefactors
and departed in a shower of ash, their legacy
a heap of severed hands slowly
clutching at flies.

*

But the much-sought golden cities sank below the horizon
like the tall ships of fable. For the Spaniards,
the age of miracles ended
somewhere in southwest Arkansas. The palaces of silver
turned Outlaw Liquor Barns, Triple-X Superstores,
the stuff of vision a mustard-colored mix

of smoke, dust, emissions
from riverside refineries and coal
plants along the Mississippi where squadrons
of John Deere combines like barn-size locusts
roll in drill order over the dry land,
half-effaced by squalls of chaff.

At night the fields burn.
Stray flames browse the blackened
shoulders of the interstate,
crop the stubble beneath the billboards.

*

In the state park south of Hot Springs
I fell asleep in a chair in the heat and woke
to a titmouse perched on the toe of my boot
with that peculiar weightlessness
shared by birds and planets

and I searched without hope for my place in the book.
Buzzards killed time there, their shadows
slipping across the iron ground
like fish in a shallow pool
while Time gaped
PUT_CAat the spiders that battened
PUTon the flies that
swarmed the rotten
windfall apples.

*

Tenochtitlan.
At the imperial aviary, we found
a pair of every kind of bird in the world:
parrots and finches in profusion, brooding vultures,
egrets, ibis is sacramental scarlet.
Seahawks stooped and banked

through that hostile truce and we marveled
at God’s prodigality, His exuberant
inventiveness, then piled tinder
to burn the thing to the ground.
Flames sheeted over the soaring

lattice dome like the fleet
shadows of clouds. For a time,
the structure smoldered,
a hissing wickerwork steaming as it cooled.
Here and there, a bird crashed the skein of ash

like a rogue comet bursting
the flaming ramparts of the universe.
Charmed in place, we held our breath,
beside ourselves, like couriers
trapped in a snowglobe, blinded
PUT_CAAAAAAAAAAin a tempest of embers,
astonished at the work of these hands,
the everyday miracle of destruction.

SOMETHING LIKE NIGHTFALL

something, like night falls
slow, as if
nothing in the world has ever moved
but distant hope descending, still ablaze
days soften to wonder

what else leaves
silhouettes these black lace trees
fades from me

it is you from my life
steadily, quietly
as celestial movement

Praying at the Temple of Forgiveness
for Zea Joy, in memoriam

Last Monday you threw yourself,
your body, dressed in red chemise,
in front of a train. 

It was your insatiable hunger
for a more tenderhearted world,
your husband said at Shiva.

Now no one will get to see
what you saw from inside
your snow globe where you lived,

shaking and shaking,
breaking into shards
of ungrieved grief, unanswered need.

I will remember
how tirelessly, with your son,
you worked to help him turn

sounds—coming through the implant
behind his ear—into speech,
speech into understanding.

Everyone will remember
how you skipped across the dance floor,
waving pastel and magenta scarves,

and prayed to angels.
O, dear Zea, your human bones
thin as the bones of a sparrow—

the way you could fold
your body to fit anywhere.
Rest now. You have succeeded.

INTERNAL WIND  

When you died, our son
became my son; I watch
through your eyes

and mine how he lifts
his whole body into
a long accent à droite,

arms taut, wrists impossibly
rotated back, fingers and toes
also pointed back

to all the hours, years
of practice in turning
everything around.

~ 

Over the hollow
you left, our son stretches
his fingers across

frets and strings
in C minor,
Bach’s Etudes

the way you taught,
the way you closed
your eyes, nodded, satisfied—

our son will remember. 

~

Remember how
he watched you deep-
breathe into yoga postures?

Now his own focused flow
heals what Western doctors call
tics, quiets what Eastern doctors call 

internal wind. Listen
how our son calls
to his yoga students

what he learned
at your knee: Effort
brings the rain— 

of grace.

~ 

When our son and I argue,
I feel homeless, divided,
until I remember how you

and I took turns massaging
his neck that ached from its day’s
staccato singing—

~

Sometimes I can see his tics
as flawless, meticulous,
a body expressing itself

with perfect diction.

DRIVING DOWN OLD EROS HIGHWAY

Me, in my Q50 with its hot flashes and warning beeps,
heading toward Sweet Desire, New Jersey, where my love,

soon 70, will woo me with mango, melt the mushy pulp
in my mouth—or perhaps he naps.

You, CeeCee, painting the walls pink in the tiny house in Pullman,
recently moved in with your old college flame, coming so easily

against his new ceramic hip, just the friction of it. You say
your pelvis never quite fit with anyone else, including your soon-to-be-

ex-husband of 30 years. Me, with a G-spot suddenly. A rainbow
of chaos tunneling through me when his fingers find it and flutter.

And long live the reckless tongue. The old-fashioned clit-kind
of climax. Like a young planet rising. Oh, how old and greedy I am

for that whole-body wave and chill and quiver and release.
You, purposely avoiding that whole-body wave of shiver,

as it reminds you of your ex’s dogged insistences.
For your 60th, your daughter gifted you with a mini vibrator

on a rubber ring for your index finger. A sex-thimble, you joke.
Sex over 60 seems unseemly to talk about, CeeCee,

but it seems more ungrateful to say nothing at all.
You and I speak of what our mothers couldn’t give us.

Daily I pray at the temple of Venus.

SUMMER SAYS

Pay attention to
your heat, your survival—
the tree rooted in your garden

is a sequined vernacular, a cashmere sweater.
Because nothing matters in the end
but comfort and the bending light.

Summer says, I will be the room you die in.
You will dream, neither of regret,
nor in the language you were born into.

A stranger will comb your existential threads.
You had thought, for instance, humans
were gerunds or harps bent

on playing in a diner that serves
black coffee and hard donuts.
You ask, What is the past?  

What is it all for?
Summer says, The wound of being
untaught. Says, hungry.

Says, the cypress is a hospice,
says, falter, falter, falter,
bloom bloom bloom—too soon

a pall will keep you company.

EARTH APPRECIATION

Behold this clod, umami of mould and mineral, worked
by millipedes, slowly digested
to a richness by mycelium—and fruiting,
fruiting with an explosion of possibility.

If I could put a frame around the wind—
a thin one, black, a way to point out
wonder—then we could see the paths
of gnats and sparkling moths, amazement
of maple key and mated dragonflies, tiny
rainbows in fog and flake and droplet.

LUSTING, STINTING

How we thirsted for sweet
achieving, to have the world
gush warm reward. Or drip,
or trickle, even ooze—some
something to fulfill the easy augurings
that graceful makings yield
swift returns. They yield,
in fact, to power, and to time
that’s flowed by us while
we labored and we crafted worth.

And so we climbed to pierce
time’s trunk, so carapaced it seemed
indivertible, a steely force
to move unwilling worlds. The spile
that wounded that fierce power
drew life from every hand
it touched, spilled spirit
that sighed forth and wreathed
the ray of time. But we succeeded.

Drop by stiffening drop the instants
fell, encasing empires, globing
moments—each honeyed gall,
each bittered rapture. I don’t know—
the others may be suckling sweet. But here
in my eternity, I feel the sucking wound
that is my life, steaming into snow. How
I wanted. How I failed, in getting.

ABBA-1975

Abba’s lyrics, like water
shot from La Bufadora,
mingle with volcanic steam
from metallic pots of corn.

And the scrape on my knee
from chasing the seagulls
bleeds, but does not hurt.

On this Sunday, the ocean breeze slips
in gossip between vendor stalls
as young men in speedos walk past.
Tables of silver bracelets tap my eyes
and ABBA’s Spanish melody
carries on my tongue
before any English syllable
ever arrived.  Before the summer ended
when it tore me
from the sands of Ensenada
to a desert north of the border,
to a land with tongues
unfamiliar and stiff.

And now when I fall
chasing my shadow, my ABBA
lyrics cannot permeate
foreign soil.  Cannot stop the pain.

On the Street

Run naked through the streets
and shout, “Make love to me!”

Tag every wall in a turf war
with quotes from the palatero,
from the child who yearns for love,
from the gay son who hopes his father
will welcome him,
this time.

With your sharp and fast tongue, mesmerize
passersby as they get caught in the gunfire
of stanzas and sonnets,
popping the air.

Bellow on the street corner
of how love abandoned you,
how your life is empty,
how you aborted your dreams.
And every day it rips into you
of every opportunity you threw away.

I want that on the wall.
I want all the pain and hurt
to get out of bed, to grab that bullhorn
and run naked through the streets.

Politics

Every 20 years or so boys dress up
And kill each other for fun.
It’s the way of the wrack of the world
The wind of our imagination and our love.
To blame our costumes for our beauty
Is like to blame our bruises for our blood.
The chime is what drives us, what ticks
Our tock forward to the next spree.
The foreshortened humiliation,
The immaculate imprecation,
Is neither what we fear or what we covet.
Man is. Rats are. Take what you can
While the day is rough
Move lengthwise into the past
And blame god for never enough.