• Poems

    Heidi Slettedahl: : Lavender Burned Black

    Lavender Burned Black

    We burned it, my sister and I
    that note you wrote on lavender paper.
    The lavender burned black and fell apart.​

    You slapped me when you saw
    the purple black ashes
    but I was numb to the tingle and neither of us cried.

    Oh mother, mother, I don’t want to know
    of wrinkled sheets and whispered conversations
    and feel the pain of trying not to love you.

    But I will not forgive the evenings
    you were gone, the days
    my father spent in anger, mending the cracks

    in the house’s foundation
    pounding the nails into soft, pliant wood
    drinking warm beer

    while you cooked dinner in tense, frustrated silence
    we all ignored
    until your anger flashed and caught me with your tongue.

    You taught me lessons even in your silence,
    the dance of avoidance, the masquerade.
    The anger

    lingers in that house you left.
    It sits in the corners with the heavy dust,
    A guest we don’t dare disturb.

    The anger follows you,
    reminds you of the ashes of your love letter
    and the daughters who burned the words you wrote.

    Its tendrils grasp for me
    as I realize my handwriting mirrors yours.
    Oh how the anger flashes when I see I write those letters too.

  • Poems

    F. J. Bergmann: Three Poems

    Guardian Demon*

    If you elicit true candor (which can
    be done in many ways, like sharing
    a six-pack, a fifth, or maybe even
    brownies with a special ingredient),
    you’ll find that pretty much everybody
    has a beef: some secret grudge or sense
    of injury (using the term “sense” loosely),
    something about which, with the right
    sequence of nods and grunts, muttered
    agreement, judicious use of the words
    Grandpop used for the kind of people
    he disliked without knowing anything
    about, you can get them to start being
    more outspoken, to meet up with others
    like them, to talk a lot about the kind
    of guns they own—like throwing a stone
    into a pond, to create circular ripples
    you can watch spread out, for fun.

    ​

    *First appeared in One Sentence Poems (2017)

    Losing*

    The uniformed security guard said he couldn’t help it,
    couldn’t change anything;
    he was just there to see that the eviction went smoothly,
    which it didn’t.
    You’d think they could have waited till after Christmas.
    Somehow the kid had managed
    to save enough from his subsidized job to buy presents,
    if not pay rent.
    He’d even tried to wrap them.
    He didn’t know how to fight it
    and his social worker was on extended vacation.
    All his damaged life
    had been planned by others around his circumstances,
    beyond his control.
    And when he saw all ruined by the whirlwind
    sweeping through his story,
    he let it take hold of him too
    and opened the window and began
    throwing his gifts into the street,
    where passersby picked them up
    and walked away with them.
    It was that kind of neighborhood.
    As he flung them he was shouting,
    “that one was for my mother,
    that one was for my sister, that one …”
    And throwing them out the window,
    that was for himself.

    ​​

    *First appeared in Pemmican November 2009

    ​

    To the Victims*

    You, the ones who, captured, face to face with death,
    knelt to kiss the ground or spat through your last breath,
    your torturers, your killers, still concealed,
    remember damage done or harmed heart healed:
    the knowledge that in their midnight’s ascendant hour
    they chose to do these things, to use this kind of power.
    We vote or abstain: no reason to believe or doubt;
    no signposts mark the dangerous, descending route.
    To crush all opposition; to force through schemes:
    that’s the stuff of evil, bloody dreams,
    metalled with chrome-plate hate and driven
    by the corroded engine of religion.
    The clouds press down; the winds grow stronger;
    we’ve all seen better days, and longer.
    Now the last leaf of love falls in a black November
    and is burned, and no one is left to remember.
    There was a chance: we made our choices;
    there will be other years and other voices.
    Leaching into groundwater or suspended in smoke,
    you might be anywhere:
    your chemical signatures imprint a billion volumes of air.

     

    *First appeared on poetsagainstthewar.org 2003

    ​

  • Poems

    Bill McCloud: Two Poems

    America

    Just before I killed him
    I saw his eyes
    Pleading
    Then blood was running between them
    and he stumbled
    and fell to his knees
    and it was over
    He lay on his back
    and still his eyes were open
    moist
    I checked his pockets
    and found only a snapshot
    of a beautiful child
    with shining eyes
    A younger replica
    of the man who lay before me
    I dropped my gun
    and replaced the photo
    buttoning back the pocket
    I sat beside the body
    until Harper came up and said, “Let’s go”
    I said, “Go ahead
    I’ll follow”
    but I knew I wouldn’t
    I began digging in the ground
    and worked
    and sweated more than an hour
    then rolled the body into the hole
    and followed it with my gun
    I filled it back
    and sat beneath a tree a few feet away

     

    ​Slow Motion

    Once I put my fist
    through a window
    for no reason at all​

    and watched the
    glass breaking
    in slow motion

    ​

    *Both poems are from Bill’s book The Smell of the Light: Vietnam, 1968-1969

  • Poems

    Arvilla Fee: All Is Fair

    All Is Fair

    He didn’t ask for this—this land war;
    nor did his father, his grandfather, or
    his grandfather’s father,
    and yet—the scream of rockets,
    plumes of fire and acrid smoke are as much
    a part of his home as olive trees and ravens.
    He thinks about his ancestors as he slinks
    through a narrow alley beneath a bleak,
    mid-waning moon and wonders how many
    before him have cut down the same dark streets,
    careful to avoid the bodies of the uncollected,
    careful to remain unseen by prying eyes
    as wildly desperate as his own.
    Looking over his shoulder, he inches himself
    towards a building, which, by some kind fate,
    has remained standing—and within its limestone
    walls lies something far more precious than gold,
    a gift he will give to his children so he can soften
    the hollow points of their cheeks.
    He places three loaves of bread within the folds
    of his overcoat and whispers, God forgive me
    before closing the broken door.

  • Poems

    Vera Kewes Salter: Things My Husband Told Me

    Things My Husband Told Me*

    When college fell apart I returned
    my burgundy Mustang and joined the Marines.​

    I was in my new uniform when a friend called
    to me in horror as I crossed a San Francisco street.

    We marched through the City of Hue before
    it was destroyed and returned through the rubble.

    I loved hearing Dionne Warwick as she
    blasted over loudspeakers.

    I jumped out of my well-dug foxhole
    when an armadillo jumped in.

    I felt warm as a baby in the arms
    of the corpsman who carried me out with malaria.

    We loaded body bags from the Forrestal fire
    onto our hospital ship; there were more dead than they said.

    They did not want black leaders but had
    no choice after so many soldiers were killed.

    The commander sat on the hillside as my
    squad led this large Tet Offensive operation.

    I told the radio man to go to the back but he said
    I’m coming for you and slumped dead over my body.

    Airlifted to a field hospital under gunfire I saw
    a soldier strangle a wounded prisoner.

    At home I discarded my uniform and almost
    joined the Weather Underground but married instead.

    ​

    *Originally published in Persimmon Tree.

  • Poems

    Harvey Schwartz: The Hard Stuff Is the Easy Stuff

    The Hard Stuff Is the Easy Stuff

    My latte life light as foam
    sunny day my favorite trail.
    turns to coffee grounds with just one look
    at an effigy that limps toward me 
    a muted message of familiarity.
    Turning wheels shopping cart gravel and dirt.
    His empty-planet eyes pull me in like gravity.
    And his cavernous face drops me in the pit
    of a story he hasn’t told that I somehow know.


    He’s Dave, let’s say. His fall was hard
    like the booze he used when he used to care.
    But clouds of drugs were a cushion to him
    as he floated off too easy. And since then
    nothing is easy for Dave.


    His life is full: blood-soaked wounds
    machine gun blasts napalm gusts ‘copter blades.
    Dave found out that the hard stuff is the easy stuff.
    Now, nothing is easy for Dave.


    Who flew to Vietnam
    like a strong proud goose
    in a V-shaped flock.
    Victory eluded him
    and vice took its place.
    Now, a vise grips his head
    since he woke up hung-over
    to see, that he had been used.
    So he used. And no one told him
    that he would find,
    the hard stuff was the easy stuff.
    Now, nothing is easy for Dave.


    Who can’t fly away that way.
    He can’t pay the fare or just doesn’t care.
    I look aside afraid of his eyes
    I don’t want to see them
    mirroring me.

    He who had fought
    what some thought that I ought.
    And my tennis shoes morph
    into combat boots as I march into a fog
    where nothing is easy.

  • Poems

    Lorna Wood: A Legionnaire Reflects After the Battle of Mons Graupius, 84 CE

    A Legionnaire Reflects
    After the Battle of Mons Graupius, 84 CE


    . . . an awful silence reigned on every hand; the hills were deserted, houses smoking in the distance, and our scouts did not meet a soul.

    —Tacitus, Agricola


    Stabbing and thrusting in our legions,
    outnumbered two to one,

    we were pushing the savagery out of ourselves,
    as well as the land and its people,

    so that later we could fill
    the empty waste with civilization.​

    When, in fear of us, the Caledonians set fire
    to their own thatch and killed their own families,

    ​glory was written in the flames.
    Now it is only a trace against the sky.

    The clean grass, the clear blue
    after the last wisps dissipate—

    these are not fresh pages awaiting good Latin
    but our own uncertain emptiness​

    writ large, not exorcised. We stand
    awed by our powers. We tell ourselves​

    we honor the dead,
    but secretly we despair.

  • Poems

    Dale Wisely: Three Questions

    Three Questions

    What did you see them do?
    What did they do to you?
    What are these things you’ve done?

    What did you see them do?
    What did they do to you?
    What are these things you’ve done?

    There are a thousand other questions–
    circling, looking for a clear space to land.
    Not any clearing, though.

    They need a spot with enough cover.
    No one around to see.
    No enemy around to attack.

    But there are some that have already landed.

    What did you see them do?
    What did they do to you?
    What are these things you’ve done?

    Maybe you don’t trust the questioner.
    Maybe you don’t trust the questions.
    Maybe you don’t trust your answers.

    Do what you must.
    Lie to others
    but tell yourself the truth.

    What have you seen them do?
    What have they done to you?
    What are these things you’ve done?

    And listen. One more:
    What can I do for you?

  • Poems

    Dale Wisely: Stand

    Stand

    He has filled me with bitterness. 
    He has saturated me with wormwood.
    My soul is rejected from peace, 
    I have forgotten goodness.
    (Lamentations, 3:15,17)

     

    Stand before your God
    in your naked fury,
    drenched in tears.

    Demand that God look upon you.
    look!  you cry, look!
    slapping your chest

    and smearing the blood
    on your hands with
    the salty fluids there,
    look at me!

    Then: no words, and God
    hears what you hear come
    from your throat–
    your weeping mixed with bugle call,
    your wailing stirred with sirens,
    your growls with rattling gunfire,
    your groans with the groans
    of the wounded.

    Stand before your God
    in your naked fury
    in a piety of intimate rage.

  • Poems

    Bill McCloud: Slow Motion

    Slow Motion*

    Once I put my fist
    through a window
    for no reason at all​

    and watched the
    glass breaking
    in slow motion

    ​

    * from Bill’s book The Smell of the Light: Vietnam, 1968-1969

  • Poems

    Dale Wisely: Fire and Forest

    Fire and Forest

    Count out the steps to the closest source of light.

          Mike James (d. 2023)

     

    Think about moving through a forest,
    where every tree has a story,
    and the paths are worn by the footsteps
    of those who came before.

    Think that you are alone
    because you are.
    Think also that you have people
    with you on the journey
    because you do:
    Those that have been here before.
    Those you know and love
    are with you. They can be with you.
    They just can’t be you.

    Think about moving through the forest.
    On one side is the lonely dark.
    On the other, light through the trees.
    The air is thick with decay and growth
    Because they both must be there.

    Think about the path as crooked
    because it is.
    It meanders, circles back,
    leads to unexpected clearings
    with birdsong and with sunlight
    which has also made it this far.

    Then it takes you to a place
    of what must seem
    like endless night.
    We all know
    what is in the night.

    And the path forks.
    Which way do you go?
    Take your time deciding because
    once you start down
    that path you will find …
    the next fork.

    Think about the trees as scarred
    by ancient carvings
    telling stories of past storms.
    They survived. Healed over.
    Scarred. But alive.
    Stay alive.

    Think about the forest
    ahead of you
    on fire.
    What do you do?
    You’ve turned back before.
    What do you do?

    Think about walking
    through the fire.
    How do you want this to go?
    Do you want us to walk with you?
    Or do you want us to wait on the other side?

    Walk through the fire.
    It’s the closest source of light.

     

    –Dale Wisely | December 2023