Posts from the ‘Poetry’ Category

Mind Hive

by Chris Stowe

Delay, delay the droning of the bees,
oh how they demand their daily fees!
With ceaseless swarming in the mind, someone please!
Delay, delay the droning of the bees.

MGySgt Chris Stowe is a twenty-two-year Marine Corps veteran with multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan as an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician. Most recently completed a Congressional Fellowship in the House Committee on Veterans Affairs, focusing on reform and oversight of the Veterans Benefits Administration. Currently serves as Senior Enlisted Advisor to a Wounded Warrior command at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

Interrupted Sonnet, with My Girls

by TJ Reynolds

I curl my spine around her body;
she’s almost inside my ribcage.

Her head feels like a silk nest below
my chin. I breath her feather smell.

My second child, first girl, Delilah.
She watches Youtube while I type.

(she reminds me of the girl I’d do anything to make laugh
back in a suburb of Mosul in 2005 and I have to wonder
is she still alive, older then than my girl now, maybe six
or seven, but already wise enough to know that her teeth
could mean at least two things – it only made me clown harder)

My daughter flicks her hand at the next video
icon that catches her eye. I click on it solemnly

and she wiggles in my lap. For a moment
I am holding two girls, their lashes locked

together in a web of filaments. How could she
still be alive? Does she remember me riding past

waving, jeering, doing anything to stoke her
guttering will again, at least for the span of a smile?

(she leaves, her outline in sand motes broken by the passing
of my old squad’s Stryker, phantom turbines still beating
a wake down an alley somewhere in my mind, so I clutch
my girl and breathe, hoping to preserve her in my lungs)

TJ Reynolds is an MA student at California State University Fullerton. He served in 1/24th infantry and deployed to Mosul, Iraq in 2004, which has inspired much of his creative drive. TJ resigns himself to the foolish and necessary hope that poetry and art can save the world.

in the café

by David Shank

half-lit corners
shadows attend.
noir cast whispers,
secrets on the prowl.

nicotine beacons,
sinuous smoke.
silhouette’s illumed
then gone.

à toutes les tables
trowels traverse.
hopes dissolve
passing into clouds.

muses bait
shrunken matter
stirring catatonia
inspired haze.

vacant eyes,
filaments ablaze.
swirling haloes
flash and fume.

cadavers swathed
in barroom bouquet.
all arrayed
in peaceful agony.

and I, alike,
among the ruins.
pen stilled. pitcher tipped-
delivered.

in the café

David Shank graduated from the University of Nevada with 
a music degree in Theory and Composition, and worked for forty years 
as a professional musician. 
Before entering school he served in the United States Air Force, 6910th Radio Group Mobile, in Wiesbaden, Germany.

a forward observer writes haiku

by Randy Brown

1.

The King of Battle!
Genuflect to indirect
fires overhead!

2.

That song about when
“caissons go marching along”?
That’s Artillery.

3.

Flash against the clouds,
a rain of steel announced by
the crump of thunder.

4.

The archer’s tale starts
“I have a fire mission”
and ends in an arc.

5.

Much like carpenters,
we measure twice and shoot once.
Mistakes are costly.

In 2010, Randy Brown was preparing for deployment to Eastern Afghanistan as a member of the Iowa Army National Guard’s 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 34th Infantry ‘Red Bull’ Division. After a paperwork snafu dropped him from the list, he retired with 20 years of military service and a previous deployment. He then went to Afghanistan anyway, embedding with Iowa’s Red Bull units as a civilian journalist in May-June 2011. He blogs about military topics at www.redbullrising.com. His poetry and nonfiction is published or forthcoming in The Corn Belt Almanac, Midwestern Gothic, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library, Spillway, and the first three editions of the anthology Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors, published annually by Southeast Missouri State University Press.

On The River Ben Hai That Separates The War

by Raymond Keen

Streams of youth
were washing
on the banks of the Ben Hai,
near Dong Ha and Cam Lo,
on this river that separates the war.
And they were washed away
as silently as the ending
of a morning’s rain,
never to be seen again.

Raymond Keen’s first volume of poetry, Love Poems for Cannibals, was published in February 2014. His drama The Private and Public Life of King Able will be published in 2015. Since 2010, Raymond’s poems have been accepted for publication by 24 literary journals. Raymond spent three years as a Navy clinical psychologist with a year in Vietnam (July 1967 – July 1968 He worked as a school psychologist in the USA and overseas until his retirement in 2006. He lives with his wife Kemme in Sahuarita, AZ. They have two grown children.

Salt Ponds Pentecost

by Michael Lancaster

Kingfishers muttering furiously
Bordering the life of a family
Known in a clothes line
Of six pairs of jeans pinned
Upon a lifeline of wire
Stretched from weathered shed
To a post anchoring its
Occasional fabric burdens
As well as a line of tomato plants
Scrambling into spring
Amid the clarion wake-up
Call of red-winged blackbirds
Providing descant and the
Promise of indolent summer.

Mike Lancaster is a retired Army veteran, West Point Class of 1967, and a combat veteran helicopter gunship pilot with the 101st Airborne in Vietnam. Mike and his wife Ellen live on the Salt Ponds, just above Fort Monroe, in the Tidewater area of Virginia. Mike mostly writes poetry about Salt Ponds life and its spiritual quality, though two other volumes of poems and a good sketch of a novel are works in progress.

It Happened Anyway

by Eric Chandler

We bought fire extinguishers.
We changed the 9-volt batteries in the smoke alarms.
We even bought a rope-ladder.
It happened anyway.

We ate lots of fruits and vegetables.
We exercised.
We ran marathons.
It happened anyway.

We told them not to talk to strangers.
We picked them up at school on time.
We helicoptered just like we were supposed to.
It happened anyway.

We always wore our seat belts.
We made sure they wore theirs.
We obeyed the speed limit.
It happened anyway.

We drank lots of green tea.
We did the crossword.
We challenged our minds.
It happened anyway.

We got a dog.
We made sure all the locks worked.
We installed an alarm system.
It happened anyway.

We taught them the meaning of truth.
We taught them to work hard.
To take responsibility. To be themselves.
It happened anyway.

I boiled the oil.
I barred the doors.
I begged.
And it happened anyway.

The editors at Sleet Magazine nominated Eric Chandler’s creative nonfiction story “Chemical Warfare” for a Pushcart Prize. Some of his nonfiction was included in the anthologies Proud to Be: Writing by American Warriors (Volumes 2 and 3). He recently self-published a nonfiction e-book of his outdoor family adventures called Outside Duluth. He also self-published a short novel about a downed pilot in Afghanistan called Down In It. You can learn about his books and published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry at: http://ericchandler.wordpress.com/

The Army Thanks Its Troops

by Virgil Huston

Hot steel
Blazing sun
Sweat pours
Clothes soaked
Preparation
for war
Broken souls
get pink slips
in the combat zone
But they will first
finish their tours
Used up and
thrown out
Saves money
But not us
Betrayed and
bewildered
We trusted them
New crop
New breed
Unsuspecting
They can’t see
yet
Future ones
to be broken
and discarded
The Army way
to thank soldiers

Virgil Huston was an Army Signal Corps soldier who worked in computer systems administration in Iraq from 2004-2005. He also deployed as an Army contractor in Afghanistan in 2011 and to Iraq as a State Department contractor in 2012, performing electronics maintenance on elevated sensor systems both times. 

Sunday’s War

by A. M. Gwinn

He’s writing about the war, in the room
where the dim glow flashes and crackles
in his Sunday dinner. The children have
been sent to their rooms, drowsy and full.

But the metaphors refuse to coagulate
in the blood spilling like milk or curl
like the bodies, melting from the burn,
into snakes of esses and oh’s.

“Daddy!”

The screams rise like a tower, rip through
his chest as Titanic was opened to water.
From the room of painted butterflies and
faeries; wings unsinged and unfurled, pink
palms stretch upward, their eyes a church
service, lilting like baby birds, “Daddy, tuck us in.”

A.M. Gwynn is the daughter of a retired veteran. She writes poetry and short fiction. Her recent work will be featured in forthcoming issues of War, Literature and the Arts, Fiction Southeast, and Sleet Magazine. Her work has also appeared in Grey Sparrow Journal, Boston Literary Magazine, Nailed Magazine, and Muddy River Poetry Review. She resides in Germany.

Homecoming

by Jeff Drifmeyer

(On the occasion of the return of soldiers of the Army’s 3rd ACR to the cold plains of Ft. Hood, TX, 0200 hrs., Saturday, 10 Jan, 2009.)

Flood lights illuminate a ‘ghost formation’ of duffle bags,
Adjacent a small mountain of backpacks and rucksacks await,
Hard to imagine, our beloved soldiers endured 15 months with only what they could carry.

Inside, the old gym had seen many a big game, but never looked better.
Walls covered floor to ceiling, all manner of signs, posters, and banners of proud kid’s work.
Happy messages; ‘love you,’ ‘welcome home,’ and ‘thank you,’ in red, white and blue.

The DJ didn’t have to hype the crowd.
‘Born-in-the USA’ blaring!
Spouses, children, parents, grandparents, friends, relatives –all anxiously wait.
After 15 long, hard months, the countdown of days, now down to minutes…

“They’re here!” the announcer suddenly proclaims.
In they file, proud and orderly, onto the gym floor, in formation, and..,
the whole place explodes with raucous JOY!

Welcome home beloved soldiers,
Land of the free, Because You Are the Brave!
Finally, my daughter is safely home from war.
Thanks be to GOD.

After “winning” the first draft lottery (circa 1969), Jeff Drifmeyer joined the USMCR and served six years in aviation support. After graduate school he joined the Army Medical Service Corps and served for 20 more years. His oldest daughter returned safely after 15 months with 3rd ACR in Mosul. Jeff has self- published two books, a military thriller on bioterrorism and a work of narrated non-fiction, “Civil War Comes Home.” He appreciates the growth and support of the College of William & Mary Veterans Writing Project.