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Dear Mr. and Mrs. Smith
I know you have already received your letter in which there are no details of your son's death on the third of October in Mogadishu, Somalia. I know it came as a telegram, folded, inconspicuous, brought to you by two men in uniform, arms folded tightly behind their backs, haircuts…
Liatiko, In the Fields
LIATIKO A variety of early ripening grape native to the island of Crete where it has been cultivated since the Bronze Age I When the planes came, she was kneeling in the arbor, unwinding roots from a stone, the way her father showed her before taking the rusted rifle from…
honest/clean
“I love it. I love the fight. It's just I don't think we should be fighting in that country. I don't think we should be fighting a war there for any reason whatsoever. But when it actually happens, for those few brief seconds it's—it's honest, it's clean. There's no politics…
My Vietnam Buddy
To Mike Neuzil (1969-70) l. NEUZ WELCOMES ME HOME July, 1970 Neuzil, my Vietnam buddy, bussed from Chicago, Not thinking I wanted to leave him behind too. He said his wife cheated, and that he had nowhere else to go, While his finger picked at the air, as if picking…
In the Silos, Baghdad Zoo, Of Canyons and Their Discontents
IN THE SILOS The low hum, the invariant bleeping. Outlines of cities green and glowing; old coordinates cling to their circuits like grease. Technicians in Tyvek mop steel brows, polish hulls with diapers, sing lullabies, though the thrill's long passed through overstocking: crushed velvet dusters sizes 2 and 18, potato…
Tattooed Poets Project
Poets’ tattoos and the work they inspired
Google Lit Trips
Use Google Maps to re-create literary characters’ journeys
House of Design
Author Websites, Book Designs, and Email Marketing by Shaila Abdullah
Unbeknownst to You, My Brother
By Lucia May
Two Sides of a Ticket
By Helen Leslie Sokolsky
The Dead I Know, Lines for the Fleeing Widow and Her Children
THE DEAD I KNOW I squint at the dead who are not mine— these ants I have drowned with poison. My presence does not frighten the live ones, their antennae sifting through death like knuckle hairs in the wind. They scuttle in and out of last night's plate, passing the…
Can We Believe Them?
My boy slid away into Iraq. he leaped across the shimmering sands into Tikrit. he didn't know where he was going but he went. they said they would not call him, they said they were saving all the good boys for last. he went. smiles and cheers and a mass…
A marking, for each and all
I. She'd wake when he'd haul her from the comforter, his hands at her throat, pinning her to the wall. Orange—she spoke one morning sipping o.j. by the sink in the east-side window sunshine as the fry pan sizzled with pork scent beside her— his eyes always looked orange in…
The Torturer Describes His Job
But my people heard not my voice…so I gave them up to the hardness of their hearts… —Psalm 80 First you make them strip. It puts them off balance. I always keep a poker face. They never can. There's a rush of dread in their eyes, and you know they're…
The Counterfeit Seal
In Athens each Sunday of our honeymoon my first wife and I scoured the old flea market at the edge of the Plaka, beside the ancient Agora said to be the true birthplace of democracy. We were each searching for that one treasure whose value dealers of trinkets, junk and…
War Metaphysics for a Sudanese Girl, Milk, Mud
WAR METAPHYSICS FOR A SUDANESE GIRL I leave the camp, unable to breathe, me Freud girl, after her interior, she Lost Girl, after my purse, her face: dark as eggplant, her gaze: unpinnable, untraceable, floating, open, defying the gravity I was told keeps pain in place. Maybe trauma doesn't harden,…
A Quiet Evening by Fort Johnson
(James Island, South Carolina) Better to kill one's enemies, Said Machiavelli, than spare them While seizing their estates: The clan forgives the murder, But never theft of status. Why do I think of that Patrolling, late at night, My groomed, well-watered suburb On an arm of Charleston's harbor? I know…
The Unknown Soldier
I went out in the dark tonight and through the night, I strode down where the yellow lamplight makes pale circles on the road and I walked out past the faces, empty, in an empty land through a thousand empty places where the ghosts of trees still stand. I walked…
J-P
I'm not ashes or trees or stars, not any of these rock markers here in this stone forest you call a cemetery, all of them squares where people still write their names on walls thinking they'll be remembered in a mason's chisel. Some were rich, BIG stones, marble, some poor,…
Wings of a Boy
He squeezes my cage. He pumps my breath. His hands know the art of the kill. He brings me blind, veiny babies squirm-sleeping in their nest squatters from today's luxury Home. A plump mother dove lays frozen with fright in his hand. He fits a box in the window. He…
Lynette’s War
My cousin Lynette says she's tired from cleaning East Main houses of rich bitches. They don't even shit like us, got toilet seats that float to the bowl, never make a sound, and she hands me the baby over the front seat. Days off Merry Maids, we like to drive…
War Time
Dawn of millennium, sidereal time defeated the calendar: no computer crashed, no plane fell, not a single mortgage payment reversed to 1900— as if clocks might control the night. So what if we renamed Two Thousand as Nineteen Hundred, 2001 as 1901: Would McKinley be elected president? Would Rough Riders…
Amazing Grace: A Hymn at the Home
i How sweet the sound, whispers Joanie, as her doctor says, “he's better on the xylophone;” as the Pastor, Reverend Eddie, pumps Amazing Grace by the aviary, as the Deaconess, scorned by Joan as a Lutheran nun, sings a deeper chest tone Joanie envies. She moans, damn my cigarettes! Her…
Triptych with Bridge
for H.H. 1 We were battered by storms and by men, weathered by their winds, and their minds, wilting under scorching air or crushing blows. We knew hunger and pain, and our parched mouths could not cry for respite. Our voices had been silenced and our captors were masters again.…
The Difficult Farm
By Heather Christle
The Barricade
By Ned Condini
For Ned Condini, Poet
By D. Elaine Calderin
Leaving the Lee Shore
I Prometheus Webster was the solid Maritime son of a grade-eight graduate fisherman (who read the Classics late at night, down in the cuddy, hidden behind a battered issue of Playboy). Prometheus was salted into a Christian, immersed in Sunday-morning sanctity, to please his mother most of all. Then he…
Eyewitness News, Resolutely Toward the End, Almost
EYEWITNESS NEWS And now the news: Tonight the soldiers dropped their guns to dance. The sight of spinning starlit men, their arms around such waiting waists, alarmed those paid to think the awful thoughts of war. Just how did these hard men decide on just this time to twirl in…
The Dust of Paradise
Wahshi, dark-black Wahshi, the boy from Ethiopia: a mirage ocean, a sun-land, a day-land where people are shadows, where the sun is the sky, in Africa… Wahshi-No-One's-Son, Father of none, and all alone. His thumb blots the sun like a moon as he tracks the bright trotting beast, his javelin…
Song for the Twentieth Maine
A long way down, loves, a long way down. So far to fall to rise, rise, rise. The green was all gold, and the grass not gone, the heat heavy when you left. Lots of air, thick enough to swat, shafts of light amidst summerflies, and through which you walked.…
Napalm
I was the same size as her She was naked and wailing Running barefoot on a dirt road Somewhere in Vietnam I was the same age as her We had skinny legs— Skinny arms— She was running, skin plucked Hands flapping That's Napalm, daddy said It burns I could feel…
Reveille and Taps
All beards, this crew, lank hair that hasn't been barber-shopped since the last war or two. This shady three-way intersection off the milltown bridge, their outpost now. Their drill—to rotate cardboard signs each rainless day: Why Lie? We Need Bucks for Beer. Sign display, that's a wheelchair-sergeant job. The K9…
Sestina: After the Crucifixion
(i.m. Kosovo, 1999) Consider that soldier tossing dice for rags: he'd rather gamble than believe— and who could blame him, so bred to metal and to leather, to the phalanx, the sharpened sword; stationed without appeal among angry aliens at home in their own skins? Everywhere the stench of death:…
Pissing Under Pressure
A friend told me once, laughing of course, of the terror of Fenway Park—a long, tin trough in the men's room, now extinct, whose thunder would measure the force of a man's instinct. There on the brink of this gaping oracle he'd stand, self in hand, awaiting its chorus, long…
Ajax Looks at the Stars
Achilles… can you see me lying here? Old wives' tales—old soldiers' too— say that when a hero dies he takes his place among the stars. Which star are you tonight, Achilles? I never looked at the stars myself except to see what the weather would be for tomorrow morning's battle…
Homefront: A Legacy
Arizona war worker writes her Navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her. —photo caption, LIFE, 1944 Stationed at her desk, chin resting pensively in hand, she stares at the skull almost fondly, almost smiling, as it faces the camera, hollow-eyed, resting on its four remaining…
Killing Fields, Ice Storm, Letters from the Dead
KILLING FIELDS You were talking about Indians. You were avoiding the word that might slice open your tongue, the softness Indian boarding school teachers once would have cut— for you were the girl who refused to stop speaking her language. (Call it your heart song). You were talking about Indians,…
The Comfort Women
Throughout history, through the Massacre of Nanjing to the present, women and young girls have been forced into wartime brothels. —United Nations Commission On Human Rights In the days after my father sold me, I crawled inside my fist, the darkest space and small enough to hold me. Under the…
Simon Guerrero
Joseph Hart
Joseph Hart is a poet, playwright and professor at Rutgers University, where, after thirty-eight years getting the hang of things, he recently retired. Hart writes poetry to compensate for the fact that he cannot sing, dance, or do much else requiring rhythm and grace. He believes the difference between a…
War, Trojan Horse
WAR Where is war? Which part of me? Which misbegotten sanctimony Harbors it? Where is its law? In my words of exile… Is it this brain—culprit, my abacus Its complex mathematics? Mad at the balance! Spitting out the bones Which fold is where it hides? Which artery opens up its…
After Our Own Hearts, East Wind, Rain
AFTER OUR OWN HEARTS In a war after our own hearts the warrior decides where rage will be stored, where action's jampacked and flags are spanking, where bullets will lodge, however far they've traveled in their weird trajectories. The Hottentots are on the web at new horizons. The wiry girls…
Peace for Allen Ginsberg
Don't worry Allen. I won't follow your path to extinction. I won't yawp my way on to America's slippery rooftop or dream your ghost through the back door. I won't moan into the microphone about wars that never end. I'll dream of a green automobile with a working engine, and…
The Third Line
“The third line of protection would be systems of shelters.” Julian Andrews, London's War: The Shelter Drawings of Henry Moore (2002) I am talking about the third line of a sketch covertly drawn in a close-held notebook: the artist recording not a view, but view averted: what struck him on…
9-11 Nampit
I've worked in holes before, worm-deep, we call them jackal pits, pilings, work crews strung out, stoop and kneel, down where the new rising grabs at the earth, footings, foundations, sledge and lock in the steel forms, pour the mud, rattail it all down, no air pockets, sky flaws ever.…
Night Greyhound
Miles cannot measure where the heart goes over these Dakota badlands and flat Montana plains in rain and night— Across the aisle, a young soldier going to his post tosses aside his magazine, stretches uncomfortably, aching to sleep. His uniform, crumbling out of neatness, becomes the winding sheet for the…
Strip Poker, Extreme Rendition
STRIP POKER Why would they think that someone had to teach us? That year, we played in basements, musty forts we built of rotting wood and weathered branch. Cards riffling teased a boner in our pants. Our flushes, straights, full houses, double pairs slapped down on dirt or plank till…
Making Friends Where Tapioca Once Grew
When the bunker collapsed, sand bags and girders thundered down like the wrath of god to bury me alive. (Gravity trumps lousy engineering every time.) Troops in my platoon failed to notice I was missing. They dug with admirable zeal toward the muffled screams of their friends. (I dug myself…
Thunder in the East
The first wagon was filled with uniforms of all shapes and sizes. But when we struggled to get our arms through sleeves made for grown-ups, they told us to focus on the head gear. There were only a few smaller-sized steel helmets for boys; regular army helmets dropped over our…
