Poets Against War

Nothing Breaks
Catherine Wiley
It is not torture if nothing breaks
if the dog's teeth click without meeting skin
if the bruise is blue but does not turn yellow
if the bile is yellow but does not turn green
if the bone leaves the socket without piercing skin
if eyeballs roll to white but stay inside the sockets
if eyelids close but the tears number less than 20
if electrodes dangle but are not connected
if the noose is never tightened
if pain turns to fear but fear does not turn to pain
if screams do not sound like songs
if we understand they'd do the same or worse to us
if imagination offers something else
if no one takes a picture
if no one writes it down
if no one puts it up online
if no one says no
*****


Mourning a dead Sparrow
Alexandra Kostoulas
The man who sat next to me on the plane
Speaks with a thick Massachusetts accent and orders
Jack and coke at 9 in the morning and talks about how
He’s really into his TV. and his entertainment system
And he has surround sound speakers and many dogs.

He told me: “I don’t have to worry, see I can travel, see
Because I make 50 bucks an hour.”
When I asked him what he did for a living, he told me that he drove a bulldozer
And moved wetlands.
“The tough part of it is,’ he says to me, sweating over his jack and coke,
“is that what most people don’t realize is that when you move wetlands from one area to another in order to make beaches in Rhode Island, when you move beaches, he says, sometimes you gotta kill a lot of animals.
“And I’m sure,” he says, “that most people would not want to support developing and moving wetlands if they knew how many animals and birds we killed with the bulldozer when we went through.
“But it don’t matter because I’m really into my music and when I listen to my i-pod
it all fades away and I can just plow through everything with my bulldozer and nothing can reach me.”

*

Mathew, Mark, Luke and John are four 19-year-old vets coming home
on leave from the marines.
They stand straight up and pierce the sky
They stand strong, erect as people wheel by in the airport.
Nobody pays them attention but they know, somehow in the crowded Southwest Airlines terminal that everyone knows that they were coming home from war.
And they sit in the terminal with their boots stretched out, heels anchored in the middle of the polished floors.

Their feet are in combat boots and they’re wearing camo fatigues.
They each have spiky military haircuts that are starting to grow out
that they’ve jelled artfully in strategic spikes.

Mark wonders if his girlfriend will be home when he gets there.
Luke hopes his mother has stopped using crack.
Paul wonders when his GI bill will kick in so that he can go to nursing school and
John remembers his words, echoing, searing like explosions in the minds of the women and children that have had to leave their homes and follow his command.

John and the blood, blooming out of his best friend’s arm hopes nobody will find out
about the young boy have sodomized and beaten and left to bleed to death on the side of the road.
That night, John dreams he is a corpse and that the young Iraqi boy is alive, and putting hot pebbles one by one over his eyes, sending him down the Euphrates River.
Little black magpies are pecking at the crumbs in the green grass around him on the raft.
John wishes that he could sing like the little birds that are chirping and yet every time he closes his eyes he can feel his life slipping out of his warm throat.

“I’m really into my music”, says Luke. “Sometimes when I’m listening to my music, I can just drive a tank through a whole village and nothing phases me. I’m in the zone, and it’s great.”

*

A little sparrow once dropped in front of my feet and died when I was walking.
It’s neck snapped but it was still alive for several minutes afterwards.
When I brought it into the office to try to get someone to give me some help
To rescue it, the secretaries tapped their acrylic nails screaming:
get-that-thing-out-of-here in Morse code on the Formica counter.
I answered the tapping with wet eyes and a dry mouth. What language could I use to tell them, that this little beaten creature too, needs to be loved, that this hunk of flesh and beak and bone too,
deserves to live?