Made to Explode by Sandra Beasley (e book free reading txt) 📗

man knew

in the concrete embrace of bunkers—how

or who—would never make it to

the foxhole. A sergeant catches the order

as it trickles down his just

commander’s leg. We hauled the

water. We led the dash.

We’re the vertebras necessary

so the skeleton can dance. We’re the

eighteen rounds in the length

of a minute; the fifty pounds of

an M1928 haversack. We’re the gayety

of five-card draw in

dead night, the muffled barter of good

smokes for bad booze. Privates taste

fear. A corporal will spit it out. Whether

a man remembers to thread the

diaper of his pack: the stuff of raillery,

except when it should

save your life. We chose to be

grenade men. There was no slightly.

There is no plum butter, no bread, no iced

tea, no lemon. There is a meat can, and

there may be meat in it. What’s given

to a boy as he trembles, as he turns green,

is the lesson of swim or

goddammitswim. You serve or are served

on a stretcher. Once home, belly up

to the bar and speak of the hot

dusks—how you aimed the mortar—and

remember us, who stayed in the jungles lush.

II.

The difference between liver and

foie gras, we were taught, is in how we

hold a beast’s head before feeding. We knew

the throat lining to be beautifully

calloused, like a palm. We learned how

to load the gavage, to

simmer corn in fat to give

their flesh fat in return. They told us to

keep the men. We discarded women

after hatching and the

smell was foul, but so goes summer.

We could almost taste the spread,

rich in iron, surrendering to a tongue the

way an ice cube melts in the tropics.

Nothing was wasted and of

the lies they’ll tell, that’s the worst: that our

care was a form of waste. It was love.

Everything stings less when

shot with rye. We took time to

pin tin to each swollen breast, to persist

even when they hollered or

the cage held more than it could hold.

We stroked their throats and called it a

sign of hunger

if they swallowed. We took off

shoes that shone with their filth. We knew

their feathers would not stay white.

No one had to give that speech,

nor show us how

their eyes would glaze when ready to

slaughter. How can I make

you understand? This is not a

form of betrayal. Look.

In the field, the officer’s job is to make an

office: anything else is an empty omen.

III.

But

nothing

ever

taught

us

to

be

islands.

IV.

If a mother cradles her son’s face and

praises how brave he is, how smart,

how nimble or athletic,

she is teaching him the language

of easy victory—ten points scored for

his team, the test aced, the prick of this

needle to which he did not weep. An hour

in the trench offered what was

a different dictionary. We do not

speak of smart, or brave, or honor in

battle. That’s for telegrams to the

parents, the posthumous curriculum.

Little sprinter, you have no

advantage in this marathon, no stout

legs to carry you to the finish line’s lesson.

Those soldiers who showed

grace with a bayonet understood how

the body must become a weapon to

be wielded; how every chat

is a conversation with

the self we want to save; how death

listens in, nodding. We

laughed at the lieutenants who brought

photos of sweethearts, because no

girl wants to kiss a mouth full of brass.

If the only volume is fortissimo,

it’s not music that’s playing. Among

every hour, what I recall is our

silences. Our greatest talents—

accomplishing with a look what to

a weaker man required a holler.

We raised them. We laid them down.

We learned faces but not the

names, and we left lording to the lions.

The roof of the house I lived in

had a chevron’s peak. I took in this

breath and then there was no other air.

LAZARUS

The cat flops and swims along the carpet,

ecstatic in her clawing, because I am alive,

despite the three days’ absence that she took as

my death. She could vomit in sheer joy,

and later she will, but for now

it’s head-butts and pantomime of mewing

with her jaw that ached and ran dry of sound

after my first night gone. Though I know

each of us would be better off

if she did not care quite so much, if

she displayed the feline diffidence promised—

water, kibble, company, she’ll be fine—

I confess to delighting in this small miracle

I perform in her eyes, this

resurrection. After a brief pause

to lovingly tend to her own asshole,

the cat resumes her yawp and purr.

Could I learn to greet the world this way,

to take nothing for granted? First

I’d have to think you all had died, of course,

but death would be temporary.

Truth is, I’ve tried odder routes to ecstasy.

EPIC

After C. P. Cavafy’s “Ithaka”

As I set out for home—

back home to my apartment,

to my vengeful cat, back home

to a betrothed who never

was one for textile arts—

I hope the voyage is a long one.

I hope that Homer finds me

on my great journey,

on a bar stool in Ocala

one March Sunday at noon,

though it occurs to me

after I am served

the bowl of boiled peanuts

that my hunger in this moment,

is not heroic. Who am I

in these stories? One by one

I shell those soft bodies,

warm against my bottom teeth,

tipping meat into my mouth.

Did they, too, once have names?

Did they once have sons?

How silly they look, in their little boat

with its checkered placemat sail.

I take a swig of a Bloody Mary,

spiked with ocean and jalapeño,

the one eye of my forehead pulsing.

I will get back in the car.

I will drive another 800 miles

with Aeolus’s bagged breath

stashed in my glove compartment.

And if I find home poor, home

won’t have fooled me, I

who have forged a life

that consists of leaving my life.

I’ll recall I once sat at a bar

wiping Cajun broth from my chin

with a twelfth cocktail napkin.

Blame Nobody, I sang,

Nobody—

Nobody—

Nobody did this to me.

Acknowledgments

Poems previously appeared, often in earlier versions, in Agni, The Arkansas International, Bennington Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Cherry Tree: A National Literary Journal, Copper Nickel, Gravy, The Mackinac, the Nation, the New York Times, Oxford American, Poetry International, Salamander, The South Carolina Review, Southern Indiana Review, SWWIM Every Day, and Waxwing.

“The Sniper Dance,” “Weak Ocean,” and “Bass Pro Shops” won the Adult Poetry Category of the 33rd Annual