And Some Join the Military
Laura McCullough
As a way out.
As a way into poetry. This
is Brian …
The dog has stopped chewing.
The sun is going
down.
The
boy is singing small incoherent boy songs.
We all go to the window to see the big red bullet in the sky
going down, going
into this earth, killing the day.
Brian says here, here is where the world ends,
carries the dead
arm, alive with image,
not in a bag, but
in his arms like a baby
he will someday have,
like the father
who has survived
fifteen years of shaking
recollection of his son’s
near death in that bombing—
oh, it doesn’t matter which one; if you’ve
forgotten,
there is sure to
be another one, or a shooting,
and the finger like
a cocked comma, a lone quotation,
This!
This! This!
reporting over and
over, the soldier poet recalls,
in the open wound the sun’s breath on
his lover’s
neck is,
that clavicle a place
to build a tent and crawl inside,
Howling sand vegetable swamp
humidless
here pea green air there
and
air traffic stopped today
due
to volcanic ash!
Yesterday
last week the week before
and
before, it was a body in the wheel well,
and
how silly we think! Ash circling the globe,
and
the cruises cancelled because the flights
with the tourists couldn’t
arrive, and tonight
at that event at the high school in that named town in South Dakota—
whisper it and it
sounds like every high school
in this, my my my
country of America—
there is a boy finding
his way out of something
in the small, open
faced grin of another boy
in uniform who scored
high marks in people skills,
in his ability to
convince, cajole, get close to, and close the deal.
He doesn’t carry a gun, he doesn’t
have to,
and it might seem
cheap if I say he does just as much damage
when he promises
the other boys, and sometimes girls,
that they they they
will carry a gun,
a
big, fucking, blaster, of a fucking amazing gun
that can blow blow blow
the fucking commies gooks roaches sand
fleas
krauts-teachers-other-other-other-other
muthafuckas away.
And with them,
the blown seeds already
germinated
in the new recruit’s
mind of no-other-way-to-get-out
of
this town
or
fucked up family,
the
alcoholic mother, or the sad, depraved one, or the stupid one,
or
the father with no job
(oh, sing again James
Wright of the terrible galloping! The suicidally beautiful!),
or
the incest or the not-smart-enoughs,
or the no friggin’ jobs
(a thousand people
turned out today to apply for a job at the new Appelby’s
on
Washington Ave. in No Hope, Arizona,
a thousand, and each one somebody’s
kid
or father or mother with a smile and a clean shirt
going
sweaty and grey in the hot,
long
line of what-the-fuck-I-bother-for-anyway?).
Read that as I, motherfucker. I.
I didn’t get
the job.
I wasn’t good
enough.
I didn’t have
the money.
I got pregnant.
I got her pregnant.
I did that awful
thing to the kid next door.
I dreamed of being
a hockey player.
I played the video
game all day.
I played so I wouldn’t
cry.
I burned my arm with the cigarette because I couldn’t.
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