Desert Storm
“In this era of big brains, anything which can be done will be done — so hunker down.”
—Galapagos, Kurt Vonnegut
I once collected colored plastic tags
from bread-bag wrappers.
The myth was: they’d buy wheelchairs for Vets.
When you’re young
you long
to be deceived
to believe this good thing, or that, is normal; real—
possible. When you’re naive,
you won’t accept that mortal combat
is highly probable.
A million hobbled souls as one
hunkered down on opposite breathless edges
of a finite line, sealed in their
hourglass of sand.
You didn’t
believe it.
One hundred hours of hell don’t lie:
shit, sweat & dust-caked weapons
conspired in Desert-storm’s
recoil.
You couldn’t
conceive it.
False daylight in geysers
of molten oil; night-sky in rocket-spasm;
the beggared land wild & foul
as Baal’s deranged bastard.
One million souls for hire—
told it’s “the norm”—so those back home
can overlook exactly where
we aim.
(Innocence
cannot be reborn).
Collectors hoard colored dogtags
that Vets with plastic legs & colostomy bags
sell from their wheelchairs
for bread.
(What’s done
cannot be undone).
Decades ago, autodidact and bloody-minded optimist kerry rawlinson gravitated from sunny Zambian skies to solid Canadian soil. Fast-forward: she follows literature and art’s muses around the Okanagan, barefoot. She’s won contests; i.e., Geist, Postcards, Poems&Prose, and Fusion Art; been featured in AntiHeroinChic, Reflex Fiction, Centrifugal Eye, and Adirondack Review; and appeared in such anthologies as Forgotten Women (Grayson Books). Visit: kerryrawlinson.tumblr.com. Tweet @kerryrawli.io
