Heroes of War # I
The nights remind me of old x-rays
of grandmother's arthritis. It was about
as intimate as she
got during the late phases
of the war. When it rained, we prayed
to the sea anemones reciting chants in our ears.
Vladimir, with one arm in a sling, tapped
my shoulder & said to look up at the night sky.
He said it was a kind of reverse harvest.
We opened our hands. What fell were the things taken from
us.
Heroes of War #2
Her face in the low-key of mist.
The tattoo on her shoulder reads
"Ark Begin Again." Her gun jams
& I signal her that I'm past perfect.
We share a bottle of anyone's soda.
We are one mile from the railway,
but the trains are stalling underwater.
We can hitch a ride on a stone, I joke.
Her eyes devour me.
The post-landscape is a variety
of breadcrumbs. Her
belly growls
that she is tired of long needles
to put her to sleep.
She's tired of stick-figured rapists.
Heroes of War #3
After we heard our
fathers and brothers had lost,
we were naked to the comets. There was the sound
of wind chimes imitating ruined choir girls.
Mother tried to face
herself in clear broth.
My sister fabricated stories about eagles landing
on her bare arm. At
midnight, we held hands,
hoping in some way to peck the eyes out of the night.
After mother died by slipping in her sleep, we exhaled
the souls of our old
toys. The soldiers of Ark came
knocking on our
doors. They said "You have company."
Kyle Hemmings lives and works in New Jersey. He has been
published in Your Impossible Voice, Night Train, Toad, Matchbox and elsewhere.His
latest ebook is Father Dunne's School for Wayward Boys at
amazon.com. He blogs at http://upatberggasse19.blogspot.com/
