New Poetry by Jennifer Smith: “So This is My Career?”

BLANK AND CONFUSED / image by Amalie Flynn

 

So, This is My Career?

Ecstatic to deploy, I qualify on 9MM handguns—

Battle ready Air Force lawyer to defend both Iraqi and Enduring Freedom

Engineers advance to the front lines:

spend billions, move like lightning, build tents, site trailers,

provide food, water, and air conditioning. Our soldiers’ beddown

enables our fight for Oil

Sign off on this funds request, the Engineers demand

What is our mission? I ask

Make the Afghans modern, the Department of Defense

replies. We will build 200 police stations, use a US blueprint

 to cut costs. The villagers can reign in their warlords

What do the Afghans want? I ask

The US Generals look blank and confused

the second-floor bathrooms flood—the

Afghan soldiers’ Islamic practice of making wudu requires them

to wash their feet in waist-high sinks before praying salah

I fly in a contractor’s Russian MI-12V-5 helicopter to inspect one remote station

for future construction claims. Are there any? I ask

We bribe the local warlord—to keep the peace, the Lieutenant says in a whisper



New Poetry by Todd Heldt: “This Is A Drill, This Is Only A Drill” and “Suffer The Children”

ACTION IS PRETTY / image by Amalie Flynn

 

This is a drill. This is only a drill.

They voted to abolish history.
There had been no commercials.
We didn’t know which wrong to fear most,
and nobody got the joke.
When the polls ran out of ballots,
somebody hurled a beer bottle
through a church’s stained-glass window.
Peace officers deployed
pepper spray for the white kids
and bullets for the black.
You should expect to see things
like this in democracy. Because
the cost is always
what the market will bear.
We all went home or to jail,
or to hospital or morgue, grateful.
America in action is pretty,
the Blue Angels swooping in for the kill
as spectators cheer from the beaches below.
We don’t even know who we are fighting.
Someone is crossing himself.
Someone is crossing the border.
War is just how we learn geography,
and someone scaled a wall
to pick your corn. Good people
are unarmed and
defenseless in church,
and no one will tell us straight
which group of not us we should bomb.

 

Suffer the Children

12000 kids in detention
300 shot dead in their schools
200 bombed by drones
the ones we don’t know to mention
and the ones the future will starve
my two who are safe in their bedroom
who cry when they are scared