Medic, and: "The Disappeared"

38 the minnesota review Dennis Trudell Medic for Rich He can't put the bodies back together, and he can't put the bodies back together. The Vietnamese arms and the Marines' private parts . . . the children he held he didn't hold right, and now he can't pass them gently enough because they were ten years ago and his own arms are extensions of the bruise inside his waist. He can't stop holding the children and letting go, and the children have legs that won't fit on the stubs of their parents, of his parents, of the bartenders where he drinks too much and not enough. Not enough ... He was eighteen and drunk every night because every day moved under his hands and it whimpered or the skin slid off, or the kneecaps would have been funny— facing the opposite direction from the other, except the little girl wasn't laughing. And the kids who would have been jerks from other high schools back home, sneers in cars to leave behind inside squeals at traffic lights, hadn't sneered because their faces were holes and his hands fell inside. And they fall inside as they lift the shot glass, the pipe for hash, the slight weights they have lifted for ten years after the holes rose and surrounded his dreams. He will put himself back together, he says, and he will sew himself back. Saturday night with the enemy spilling onto the earth again, the cot, the plastic bag, spilling onto the mess from the point man from Kenosha. And he tells it in Wisconsin, the medic who wasn't good enough because he wasnt God: trndell39 they won't fit, the parts of bodies in his dreams; the point man won't hold the princess of Kenosha or anything else. The enemy goo cant be packed back inside. He looked at me and his own fingers moved and strained above the bar — the parts wouldn't fit. And he grinned. He will do it. Rich, do it. Let yourself fill the spaces between limbs and trunks that will never repair, let the pain you have carried this far be the difference between a brown ear and pale cheek. Grin further and move the light in your eyes the rest of the way across that ocean and ten years. We got some problems here, some wounds, and we need you to help see. And to stand slowly, and move, and ease one part of a future that will sing after we die onto another part, and guard it and massage. 40 the minnesota review Dennis Trudell "The Disappeared" (Desaparecidos) At the ends of cigarettes in mouths of men in uniforms and dark glasses; in the glint sliding around the toes of their boots, and their boots. Surrounding narrow cylindrical objects in trash cans outside of buildings with no names, with few windows— objects smelling vaguely like shit or birth. Beside them, styrofoam containers for hamburgers from the North American corporation down the street ... In the fingertipwhorls of men discharged now, unemployed in a village with their dream of something alive turning and turning as it shrinks from their push and a helicopter door; between the "flying" and "nuns" spoken louder than a smirk at cocktail parties. Between the folds of napkins at the U.S. embassy, the Brazilian embassy, the Chilean embassy . . . Behind decimal points in the price of a share in an abstraction including ITT World Directories, Inc. In the small photographs carried by mothers, quivering; in the growing weight of silences between the mothers. Under the empty places on mattresses beside two other adolescents, filled by two younger brothers. Among words at the conference table. In the muzzles of automatic rifles unloaded from Israel — but also in rhythms arising from the smallest toes at the meeting about a strike, in veins around campfires . . . Riding flakes of ash over the capital city; in testicles of sergeants touching a light switch in their own homes, in rooms rented from families by prostitutes; widening as the eye pupils of schoolchildren and darkening there, more vital than fear, than molecules of the largest desks in the hemisphere .... ...