STRANGERS IN WAR

by Howard Winn

Image source: Wodu Media: Inspired By Design

Comrades in arms says the convention,
through thick and thin, fire and ice,
bonding in the mud or the flak filled skies,
singing arm and arm through alcoholic haze
with your buddies because Uncle Same Wants View,
to see what can we say if we walk away
over dead meat, pulpy in decay,
from those who do not make it.
None of them are authentic friends, I am afraid,
the sort from your home town, perhaps,
grown up with,
who know your past.
Party-goers, guests, visitors
to the same happening, passing through,
but friends? I guess not.
Fellow victims of the same old men
with political ambitions,
perhaps.
Even years later, if some connection is made,
there is discovery of disassociation,
or we talk in different languages
even when the subject matter is the same.
The schools we went to are not the same,
nor is the curriculum, official and unofficial.
We are not friends although we survive
the great accidents concurrently.
Players of pinochle or poker together,
or observers of smoke and blaze,
even the illusion of buddyhood
in the stories of common encounters,
does not create friendship.
We do leave the dead behind,
whatever the code,
even if we scoop up the detritus
of life left behind.
I speak from experience.


Most recently Howard Winn has had poems and fiction published in Dalhousie Review, Descant (Canada), Cactus Heart, Main Street Rag, Caduceus, Burning Word,  Pennsylvania Literary Journal. Southern Humanities Review, Cutting Edgz, Borderlands, and The Hiram Poetry Review. His B. A. is from Vassar College. His graduate degree in creative writing is from the Writing Program at Stanford University. His doctoral work was done at New York University and University of California San Francisco. Howard Winn was a psychiatric social worker in California and also taught there for three years. Currently, he is a State University of New York faculty member.

MEMORIAL

by Eric A. Weil

Image source: WN / Sayali Santosh Kadam

Twenty acres of cabbages
ranked in military green,
harvest coming soon.
My nostrils twitch
with that raw-earth smell,
and I think
of soldiers’ helmets
on rifle stocks
standing between
pairs of boots
in the sand.


Eric A. Weil lives and teaches in Elizabeth City, NC.  This poem is from a series tying the landscape and wildlife of eastern NC to an inescapable weariness about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Eric has published two chapbooks, A Horse at the Hirshhorn and Returning from Mars.

RAW STUFF

by Carolyn Gregory



Their guns become their dolls,
each with a girl's name on it
and carved tattoo
they caress and polish
like vintage cars

With summer on their hands
and nothing playing at the movies
after the slasher film goes
the way of its bloody machete,

they train on tin cans
popping off little soldiers
on a fence,
steady as she comes
before antlers and coyotes follow --
no time for sentiment

Back with their kill,
they puff up chests and strut
as they continue
making men out of raw stuff,
rifle in a backpack,
Glock in a leather pocket.


Carolyn Gregory's poems and essays on music have been published in American Poetry Review, Main Street Rag, Bellowing Ark, Seattle Review, and Stylus. She was featured in For Lovers and Other Losses. She was nominated for a Pushcart Prize for poetry in 2011 and is a past recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council award. Her book, Open Letters, was published by Windmill Editions in 2009 and her next, Facing the Music, in 2012. She has been working on a series about the history of guns in America for several years now.

WHEN ISRAEL WAS ATTACKED

by Laura Eklund

"Contrary Theses,"Acrylic on Canvas by Laura Eklund

I imagined men in bare feet
and soldiers building the toolbox
that was never big enough.
Half of the stars forgot to see
though I could see Heaven
dotting the sky
in the far-off distance.
We talked over dinner
with faces in the background
though it was barely enough
the roots of the earth kept growing
toward the aspects.
Compressing the story
that could never be told

the protestations of children
tucked into the night.


Laura Eklund is an artist and poet. She lives and works in Olive Hill, KY with the poet George Eklund and their four chldren. She has been writing poetry since she learned to read and write, which was about third grade. She writes in order to breathe and survive.