When the flowers were stolen from my uncle's grave
My grandmother drove to our house and collapsed at our door
Strangled as an empty Christmas stocking
Wailing for her piece of coal
I have never seen a person so finished with God
Her face was a massacre of grief Her cries
Like shoveled granite chewed through her shrilling throat
All they left was the flag, she kept screaming
I thought her lungs would start bleeding
It scraped my chest clean
Hollowed me for weeks
Our house was the echo of a mother
Clawing the floorboards for her dead son
A downed forest in her nail-beds.
At night I obsessed over how long flowers might survive in the hands of thieves
Spent a month in our basement scouring for answers
In the photographs of my father in Vietnam
He was as thin as a blade
His eyes unfiltered as the cancer they were given for free
Anyone could see, by the freckles in his shame,
That war was no place for a soldier
The heart is no place for the talons of the kind of secrets
You can only keep in the same chamber you will keep loaded
To keep your hands from shaking
The ghosts of dead children awake
My uncle wasn't killed by a bullet
He drank himself to sleep trying to drown their tiny screams
My grandmother followed him to the grave like every mother does
I keep thinking of them today, as I sit in my parent's living room
My father has been home from the hospital for a week
And I was just told he spent 3 years in a field of agent orange
But is refusing to accept his 10% veteran's medical discount because
A patriot knows cost of war and pays for it himself.
I have written this poem before
But always through a window
Never through an open door.
I find my mother by the stove stirring spaghetti sauce from a jar.
I have never heard her breathing pull this hard.
Earlier, in the car, while my father broke down she turned the
Radio dial up to save him the embarrassment of his whimper
The radio was playing "I Wanna Sex You Up"
We listened to it at full volume for three minutes
It was fucking hilarious
How none of us heard the word
I don't hear the words anymore.
The president announces the end of a war
And I just stare at my mother's eyes as my father's face falls into
The trembling trench of his hands, like a boy fresh out of bootcamp
Who has just dropped his gun into somebody's cradle.
When a war ends, what does that look like exactly?
Do the cells and the bodies stop detonating themselves?
Does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother?
When the sand in the desert has been melted down and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at
Does a white flag make for a perfect blindfold?
Yesterday I heard a story about a little girl in Iraq, 6 years old who can not fall asleep because
When she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog eat her neighbor's corpse
If you told her the war was over do you think she'd sleep?
She's seen teeth chew through a ribcage and swallow a heart and I can buy
Dog tags at the mall, I can buy camouflage at the gap, I can stare at
The Vietnam Wall and forget it is missing the 2 million names of the 2 million vietnamese slain
So I can certainly forget about the little girl, the dog, the neighbor,
And whichever soldiers we choke-chained in the opposite
Direction of God.
At 4 AM I find my father in the living room, television blinking
The news caster says that the number of US soldiers killed this
Month at war was outdone by the number that came home and committed
Suicide.
Outside, there is a flag waving from our front door.
My father picked it out as carefully as he picked out my name when he built our house.
I want to tell him that I still build my spine from the clothesline that holds his work shirts.
But I know I'd start crying
I'm exactly like him
We both have wrinkles around our eyes, a hundred years older than our ages
We both carry ourselves like ambulances with someone dead inside
Still thinking we'll get there in time.
I didn't get here in time.
This house echoes like an empty canteen,
Flowers don't survive long in the hands of thieves.
So much is wilting.
I back look out the window at my father's flag a glow in the
Moonlight. I remember something I was told many years ago
I was told in World War II, 80% of us soldiers could not bring themselves to kill
An enemy soldier they found sleeping.
Sleeping.
I want to ask my father if he thinks that is true,
Because I know he won't
Sleep if I do. And he needs to sleep
God knows we all do.