VA Hospital Confessional

Each night is different. Each night the same.

Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don’t.

When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there,

gesturing, as if saying, Aren’t you ashamed?

When I don’t, he douses himself

in gasoline, drowns himself in fire.

A dog barks in the night’s illuminated green landscape

and the platoon sergeant orders me to shoot it.

Some nights I twitch and jerk in my sleep.

My lover has learned to face away.

She closes her eyes when I fuck her. I imagine

she’s far away and we don’t use the word love.

When she sleeps, helicopters

come in low over the date palms.

Men are bound on their knees, shivering

in the animal stall, long before dawn.

I whisper into their ears, saying,

Howlwin? Howlwin? Meaning, Mortars? Mortars?

Howl wind, motherfucker? Howl wind?

The milk cow stares with its huge brown eyes.

The milk cow wants to know

how I can do this to another human being.

I check the haystack in the corner

for a weapons cache. I check the sewage sump.

I tell no one, but sometimes late at night

I uncover rifles and bullets within me.

Other nights I drive through Baghdad.

Firebaugh. Bakersfield. Kettleman City.

Some nights I’m up in the hatch, shooting

a controlled pair into someone’s radiator.

Some nights I hear a woman screaming.

Others I shoot the crashing car.

When the boy brings us a platter of fruit,

I mistake cantaloupe for a human skull.

Sometimes the gunman fires into the house.

Sometimes the gunman fires at me.

Every night it’s different.

Every night the same.

Some nights I pull the trigger.

Some nights I burn him alive.

I embrace the frightful and the beautiful

AL-BAYATI

At Lowe’s Home Improvement Center

Standing in aisle 16, the hammer and anchor aisle,

I bust a 50 pound box of double-headed nails

open by accident, their oily bright shanks

and diamond points like firing pins

from M-4s and M-16s.

In a steady stream

they pour onto the tile floor, constant as shells

falling south of Baghdad last night, where Bosch

kneeled under the chain guns of helicopters

stationed above, their tracer-fire a synaptic geometry

of light.

At dawn, when the shelling stops,

hundreds of bandages will not be enough.

Bosch is walking down aisle 16 now, in full combat gear,

improbable, worn out from fatigue, a rifle

slung at his side, his left hand guiding

a ten-year-old boy who sees what war is

and will never clear it from his head.

Here, Bosch says, Take care of him.

I’m going back in for more.

Sheets of plywood drop with the airy breath

of mortars the moment they crack open

in shrapnel. Mower blades are just mower blades

and the Troy-Bilt Self-Propelled Mower doesn’t resemble

a Blackhawk or an Apache. In fact, no one seems to notice