Search Results
Below are the results from your search. Looking for free contests? Please login here.
Page 59 of 112 pages. ‹ First < 57 58 59 60 61 > Last ›
After Afghanistan
We regret we are not able to make this poem available online at the present time.
A Thug to Soldier’s Story
We regret we are not able to make this poem available online at the present time.
Elizabeth F. Cleary
Kareem Carter
childplay
By The Poet Spiel
One Soldier’s Day, in Pieces, Incline of the Heart, City War Zone
ONE SOLDIER'S DAY, IN PIECES 1. And then it was over. Just like that. As quick as the storm that started. A young girl says, “Hurry, Mommy! The sky is turning black.” People look out from their New England porches. Bunched purple iris, a waft of sweet honeysuckle climbing the…
Hiroshima Ghost Couple
Engaged in bed, asleep this still as if nothing disturbed them. The cloud that looked like war was just a bird, the bird that looked like war was just a kite. Waking, they sit at a table, they spread honey over slices of peeled green apples while, at the end…
Baggage Claim, In/Out Country: Sergeant Kokesh, Bomb Scare
BAGGAGE CLAIM Duffel bags always remind me of them—bulging behind long zippers— on television the body bags flapped wildly as copter blades churned and the news anchor dourly intoned the new stats out of Vietnam. More awful that we saw so little—could have been anything in them. Now we see…
Report from Herat
“You've never seen a woman's face? You wrote the rules, so gorge on them, not me!” I want to shout this at the men in Herat, who crowd my frame to stare at my yellow hair, powder cheeks, red lips as I phone my story in or try to interview…
They Give Me Money Near Karbala
Shebat walks for grain, for soap and oil, and to collect her children, but now she drives—Yassin's Toyota, Yassin who was lost near Basra. She whisks the wheel like she does a bucket lip for sand before she pumps. I drove with my uncle, she says. He let me work…
William Snyder
Andersonville Prison Camp, 1864
1. Day Shanties jut from foot-churned clay like upturned plowshares, thorns. Scarecrow men with melon stomachs stare through other men as if through glass. Some keep their sense of duty: rations to gather a letter to mail a friend to take to the deadhouse. Letters are written, seldom sent; the…
Life Expectancy
My father is a death row chaplain. During his visits the prisoners' legs are chained to a large bolt in the floor. Their hands are bound to their belts. Mostly they want to talk. My husband saw a bat dive headlong into his hardwood floor, still wet with polyurethane. It…
DynCorp International
Buzzed boys burn like oil drinking matches in the tin oven of the Earth. Death is masculine— not a frail Grim Reaper pop-cultured into oblivion on rock albums and motorcycle promos. He claws through steel and wood with bronze arms and thighs, binges on thumping pulses and devours tattooed peach…
My Father’s Helmet
You want to empty a heart like some men discharge a gun? Have someone you love die— or go off to war. I have seen my father go off to war a hundred times a day in his head. It is his way of dying without really leaving. Last night…
Twenty
This poem is published in Wet by Carolyn Creedon (Kent State University Press, 2012).
Carolyn Creedon
Canal Fishing Just Beyond
Writhing swamp air souls, those muggy wraiths, click like tiny bones breaking in the hot fragrance of asphalt. Our cool canal lies lower and lily-padded, frog laden, bugged, where time ticks slower into nothing good but shade. They mightn't have, but I seen you where silver sunlight seraphs shimmer past…
Cantus for the Horses
On the 18th of June 1815, At a crossroads between Belle Alliance and Waterloo, 30,000 men and 10,000 horses Were killed in an afternoon. The rye tops have been bleached white in the heat. Milkweed seed and thistle down, As fine as the fluff on a baby's neck, fly. The…
Soldiers in Love
I Five hundred voices out of one mouth cannot deflect the child's cry. No matter how many bodies respond the earth is still hungry for more, more, more. II This knife is the one I use to shave my compatriot. I wash his hair with almond soap, feel his skin…
We Need You Now, Maya, Atta Sends a Tape from Paradise
WE NEED YOU NOW, MAYA I wanted to make a cut in the earth. —Maya Lin The Wall You got it, Maya, gut gash straight down the middle. But who the fuck gave you the right to cut up this crap called air? The battle plan—black on blacker. This ain't…
Japan 1944: Fusen Bakudan, The Time and Fates of Man
JAPAN 1944: FŪSEN BAKUDAN When fifteen-thousand Japanese school girls giggle, they hide their mouths with riffling fingers that hover as weightless as hummingbird wings. This is why General Kusaba chooses them. On the coastal curve of Honshū, these slight vessels, no younger than thirteen, no older than fifteen gather each…
Cry Me a Bucket
He hit me because he saw dead babies in Vietnam. Or is there more litter on that path that leads to war? It's not your fault he said. I'm sorry. It's not your fault he said. Again. In 15 lonely winters I saw him cry once for the death of…
Confession
“I have prepared for use, at this time only in the East, my Totenkopf units, and have ordered them to kill men, women, and children of Polish origins or of the Polish mother tongue without mercy and without pity. Only in this way will we attain the living space that…
donnarkevic
Born in 1954, I have developed my writing skills from the Felician nuns at St. Stanislaus parochial school in Ambridge, PA, from the professors at the University of Pittsburgh, and National University where I earned my MFA. I also like to credit the Barbour County Writers Workshop in Philippi, WV,…
Pieta
Beauty…is the extra that keeps creation in motion. —Brenda Hillman What of that farm mother, her soldier son, shattered into unrecognized form; she hides her shuddering inside the closet, rubs the coat and boots he'll never need again—his body of cut-off-stems— Before, in his childlife sleep, his legs flung open,…
Kid Bowdler Sings Phaecia, Played by Homey
The first 100 lines of Book Nine of the Odyssey, from the manuscript Homey; Or, Plying on Idiocy Homey, up against it now spilled all the beans: “O AlkaSelzer, my main man, Who can be blue? When hipsters Roll their brassy syllables The diners flirt & babble, Plates pile sky-high,…
A Wild Life Zoo
—sleep is good, better is death Heinrich Heine, “Morphine” I watched a lion eat a man like a piece of fruit, peel tendons from fascia like pith from rind, then lick the sweet meat from its hard core of bones. The man had earned this feast and his own deliciousness…
Airborne
—for Gary I know men can dream through the night without human sleep. They walk in secret through the same world, the bombed out warehouses and boarded up rooms of this life, when the children are gone and the cat settles down for the night, and the wife calling them…
Memories, My Life as an American, My Neighbor’s Secret
MEMORIES Sleep rots in the back of my mind; I can't use it anymore. I lie awake at night drifting into fantasies in which I steer the tank around a corner and head for home, the army coming with me. Rifles thrown down, helmets in a pile, the guns silenced…
Song
I sing to the triggers each one asleep like a clitoris. I sing to the pus in blisters that will turn back & head for the wound. I sing to the wounds opening like wet shouts across the desert. I sing to the boots, tongues out to lick the first…
Watching the News in Spain, Asking My Father About a Scar on His Arm Over Dinner, Some Pages from My Book of Pacifism
WATCHING THE NEWS IN SPAIN A Basque bomb killed a family of six. Their car was mangled, looking like a silver raisin, as if some giant hand had pinched everything together. It was comical, funny. What wasn't funny was the man carrying a blue baby out of the smoking mess.…
Ekkyklema
This poem was published in the Winter 2014 issue of Raritan.
Avery Slater
Homecoming
You cried while telling me about it, about the wandering, about the land packed and stony under your boots, the air dry as burnt bread, the skin blistering like volcanic earth, and your head, a numb little knob knowing nothing but the astonishing monotony of the miles and the village,…
Cultural Notes from the Commune
Paris 1871 A shell can whistle like an abonné backstage, or mew like a litter of kittens, scream like a soldier in his agony, tear the air like silk, or moan like a woman's pleasure climbing towards her petit mort. Bullets nip stems; leaves bury spring with fall. A sergeant…
Baking Bread One Morning of My Country’s Dying
All night they have been rising two mounds of dough in silver bowls. Covered in separate sheets, curves arching against the cloth. The kitchen smells of their deep breathing. Preparing a family breakfast, We'll send him a loaf, she says, plunging into the dough. It will mold before it gets…
Zeno in the Jungle, Through the Window of a Restaurant in Little Saigon
ZENO IN THE JUNGLE ...if everything when it occupies an equal space is at rest, and if that which is in locomotion is always in a now, the flying arrow is therefore motionless. —Aristotle, Physics, 239b.5 Remember Zeno's paradox of an arrow in flight? Replace that arrow with a bullet…
Nuremberg
For my grandfather A U.S. army dentist with bad eyesight and a tendency to stutter was called to the Nuremberg trials because the skin of the dead were made into lampshades kneecaps made into paperweights. Lawyers claimed it was the end of suffering as the sentences were passed down to…
Freedom For
I won medals for escaping friendly fire and keeping it shut. No parts are missing. Stay steady, kept eating, as my neighbor's fiancée screamed, didn't even hear it I told the police. Focus, that's the main thing. Malevolency and evil are baked in the hot sun over there. Causes and…
Tarawa
Invasion 1943 All the small lives, grieving, grieving, in the multitudinous caverns of coral are not mourned by their mother, the sea. The Pacific has bred them for this hour at dawn when the dead waters hiss and roll into life. All the millions of minute breaths that have ended…
On Patrol
You snake along on your belly, your bare elbows stained with black soil; with red fire ants chewing the fungus beneath your fatigues; while the jungle flora jiggling near your nose becomes mirage mammaries, tipped with swollen pink nipples that tickle your tongue with their fern sweetness. You ford a…
Firefight, Sticking Points
FIREFIGHT One person asked long ago before there were words for it. What's it like? Like nothing. This, in reply, the only response you had then. Even now, There are no precise words, just fragments of images that remain like unwelcome house guests eating out your substance. It's this way:…
Omega, The Patriotic Farmer
OMEGA it was desperation & the sulfuric longing for those white granite shores the amber smell of summer tanned wheat wet with morning the mountains roved with goats & wind the woody stalks of pungent oregano sprinkling rocks with deep star kissed feral green the empty pit of years filled…
Dangling Y, 1953
By late winter of '53, Able Seaman Ted Boggs and me, had served our tour honorably, and waited discharge to set us free at the Navy's Lighter-than-Air HQ, from the Jersey shore a lob or two, a vast and storied wind-swept base, a sullen, frozen, flatland place, barbwired around and…
Dress Blues
Christmas Eve. I was five. It was very late. You sat at the old upright piano playing carols by ear (mainly on the black keys) while I sat underneath surrounded by the safe smells of dust and old varnish. Melodies blurred and words slurred as you crooned them like an…
Survival Manual for Vietnam
I - Introduction A. In order to physically survive inside a combat zone, just follow one simple rule: do not get killed. B. In order to mentally survive inside a combat zone, you need to follow three, not quite as simple, rules neither thumb-tacked to your barracks' bulletin board, nor…
Death Masks from Iwo Jima and Beyond
23 February 1945: US troops have raised the Stars and Stripes over Iwo Jima four days after landing on the Japanese-held volcanic island. The 28th Regiment of the 5th Marine Division took Mount Suribachi at 1030 local time. The extinct volcano offers a strategic vantage point for the ongoing battle…
The Dread Essay
Prologue: The Hurry When the witches of time assembled the dust in their skirts and petticoats whispered foul things. The air stirred as before a terrible storm though the sky stayed blue as their sky-deep eyes. They had stump teeth, snag teeth, shards impeding their long blunt tongues. The spell…
On the Deaths of Those We Do Not Know
The spirit of truth bears another name which is even more revealing; it is also the spirit of fidelity, and I am more and more convinced that what this spirit demands of us is an explicit refusal, a definite negation of death. (Gabriel Marcel) Woke thinking of the motley the…
