More on: war

A man once told me that chaos must have a voice. A man once told me that language could heal everything. The chambers of my mind are full of wormholes. When it is smashed open, dark things crawl out of it.

Then it enters the upstairs room, to rest beside my grandmother, a Korean War widow who sold her home and bid farewell to clan and country, arriving in Arkansas to raise two children while their parents worked, who surrendered her strength in the last days of 1988 to a second stroke, but not before teaching me how to read a love letter.

For Aciek Arok Deng I leave the camp, unable to breathe, me Freud girl, after her interior, she Lost Girl, after my purse, her face: dark as eggplant, her gaze: unpinnable, untraceable, floating, open, defying the gravity I was told keeps pain in place maybe trauma doesn’t harden, packed, tight as sediment at the bottom…

During the Oregon centennial celebration, my Boy Scout troop, dressed as cowboy cavalry, was brought to the dog track to rout a whole tribe of Cub Scouts dressed as Indians in a wild reenactment of a battle that had never occurred or had occurred a thousand times, depending on your degree of historical specificity. Firing…

1. The vigil and the vigilance of love. Sitter to three towheaded, rowdy boys, the spoiled offspring of the local doctor, our cousin Maren came north for a summer and brought us stories of the arid south— cowpokes and stone survivals. ————————————-One afternoon she summoned two of us to the garage, a leaning shed with…

THE TASTE OF GRAPES was the taste south of his grandmother’s garage back home. Small as marbles, green and sour skinned—when you bit them, the skins spilt and squirted the globe of flesh into your mouth, smooth and soft; if there were any sweetness, this is where you would find it. He could not define…