to clamp the small diameter pipe

to form a smooth-bore barrel,

bracket and finishing nail

as hammer and firing pin.

1981. The Soviets fight in Afghanistan.

Magazine racks carry Guns & Ammo,

Penthouse, Hustler, Shooting Times

& Country Magazine. It is a world

filled with ballistics, armor, lethal flights

of small metal rounds, spinning.

On the back cover of Soldier of Fortune

an armed mujahedeen lying in the prone

on a rocky overlook, the coupon below him

promising: Buy a Bullet, Kill a Commie.

Reload: I pull the hammer back

to fire over and over at paper targets

with their circles driven inward,

an exercise in muscle memory.

I am learning how to connect

with the small dark silence

carried within the center of all things.

Green Alexandrine

At Divisidero and Olive, the squad cars

haven’t arrived, they’re still blocks away with sirens

switched on, the radio traffic announcing codes

of trauma – one vehicle, injuries unknown –

while I stand here, amazed, at the intersection

of pain, the traffic backed up in all directions,

a thin haze of exhaust drifting over the scene

where a Plymouth revs its engine, the wheel hub stripped

on the driver’s side, scorching the asphalt as sparks

pinwheel out as if from the hooves of a maddened

bull, the car’s metal hood ruckled from the grillwork

smashed into the stoplight’s pole, over and over,

revving the engine, the light somehow stuck on red,

juicing the accelerator with the brake pad

clamped down, as pawn shops, money lenders, liquor stores

stand witness behind wrought iron bars, the man now

in a searing kind of rage that takes a lifetime

to hone into an art form like this, a public

spectacle, clear as my great-grandfather, Carter,

beating a heifer to death with the twisted branch

from an oak tree, that kind of clarity of rage,

which moves a young woman to step out from her car,

to walk carefully into the headlights and noise,

her voice – the smallest drops of honey I tasted

as a boy – her soft words saying Are you alright?

On the Surgeon’s Table

Colonel Gustafson, you’ve done all you could.

Let the nurses disconnect clamps, retractors,

suction tubes. Let them sterilise the scalpels

as you try to forget the degloving of the scalp,

the guillotine amputation at the thigh.

You’ve done all you could for this one,

Colonel. Go to your bunk. Sleep awhile.

Try not to dream the charnel visitations

of the dead, the many questions they have,

as one holds the clear plastic covering

over his irrigated abdomen, another

staring into the blind and newfound

darkness within the skull, while the amputee

asks how he could die of shock

when the bleeding was controlled, volume

resuscitation begun, and What, Doctor –

what have you done with my leg?

Unearthed by Wind

When the winds drive south from Anatolia,

down through western Iraq and into the Kuwaiti

borderlands, the dunes shift in waves, an ocean

cresting in a swirl of dust the camels traverse