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University of Northern Iowa
War Story #13Author(s): Gerald McCarthySource: The North American Review, Vol. 290, No. 6 (Nov. - Dec., 2005), p. 20Published by: University of Northern IowaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25127470 .
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N A R
During this time of (American) war
in Iraq and Afghanistan, we honor
Veterans' Day, November 11 (once called Armistice Day), with four
poems on various American wars.
GERALD MCCARTHY
War Story #13
At the garbage dump the air fills with flies, I hear the droning sigh above the truck's motor,
the cries of children
fighting for scraps of food, tin cans, shreds of clothing. Jenkins laughs, pushes the fifty-gallon drum
over the tailgate. The children shout, surge toward us.
Watch this, he says,
tipping the other drum on its side.
It splashes down, covers them
in coffee grounds, stale bread,
egg shells.
DEREK SHEFFIELD
Body Count The bright weapons that sing in the atmosphere,
ready to pulverize the cities of the world, are
the dreams of giants without a center. Their
mathematical evolutions are hieratic rites by Shamans without belief ?Thomas Merton
They could not reach us.
They were nothing, silhouettes we fired at. I got one, I said to the ones on my side who could not stop their rifles from drawing line after
parallel line, whose eyes turned
to decimal points.
Then faces filled the shadows, their strange lines crossing
ours.
In room after room, we lie.
From the half-light of one, I listen for bedsprings and floorboards.
How many? I cannot stop aiming for accuracy, adding the three
minus a leg, four something
more.
Formulaic: each lung sac
expands so many times per minute.
If I could only breathe
without breath, snuff the racket
beneath my skin, that shuddering muscle making of my blood zero after zero after zero.
20 NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW November-December 2005
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