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The Poems We Carry brian turner Winter, 2004. Mosul. As part of the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, I’ve deployed to Iraq and taken part in numerous missions for several months. I’m a sergeant and an infantryman. I’m also a poet. When the late-night raids conclude, the depositions are filled out, and the prisoners are turned over to the military police, who drink coffee and tell stupid jokes to one another to lessen the tedium of 3 a.m., my platoon heads back to our hooches to get some rack time. And me? Before laying my head down to sleep, I switch on a red-lens flashlight (so as not to bother other exhausted soldiers sleeping in mummy bags nearby) to jot down the day’s events and thoughts while they’re still relatively fresh in my mind, before they blur into all that tomorrow’s missions might bring. I’m writing in a seventy-page, college-ruled notebook with a ballpoint pen. And I’ve been doing this for months, notebook by notebook. These notebooks offer a space for passages of prose and line sketches drawn from a bird’s-eye view; the pages fill with depictions of ambushes, vehicle and foot patrols, moments when bullets are stripped of their brassy jackets to carry the noise of gunpowder into the world. As the weeks pass by, a few fragments of poetry begin to appear. A couplet here. A stanza there. Whole poems emerge. In mid-to-late February, I cover my ears with headphones and 174 listen to Queens of the Stone Age playing “No One Knows,” over and over. Heavy rock, with an insistent rhythmic drive—the music creates an aural wall between the rest of the world and me. A buffer of sound that isn’t war. It is in this moment that I write the poem “Here, Bullet.” It takes a little less than fifteen minutes to write, and I quickly excise the three additional lines I’ve scrawled in the margin. I cross out the word finish and write in the word complete. Verbatim, this is how the poem will appear in my first book once I return home from the war. It’s the quickest poem I’ve ever composed. I fold it up, place it in a Ziploc bag, and tuck it into the left front breast pocket of my DCU (desert combat uniform) top. I will carry it here—equal parts talisman and taunt—the rest of the time I am in-country. And I will often wonder who might find this poem if I am killed in combat. What would they think while opening the pleated zipper of the plastic bag, while unfolding the worn page, while reading the strange music in their hands? 1992. Fresno. Backpack slung over my shoulder, hair halfway down my back and a scuba diver hanging by a silver hook from my earlobe, I’m walking across the campus at Fresno State. I’m a lathe operator (officially a machinist’s assistant) at a small local company located in a rougher part of town. But tonight I’m simply walking on the grass under the street lamps and eucalyptus trees between buildings. I can hear the sprinkler heads in the distance, their hammered bursts of water traversing the grass. And although I don’t remember where I picked up the poem (it was most likely given to me by the late Andrés Montoya , poet and author of The Ice Worker Sings), I have a photocopy of a poem by Phil Levine in my hands. And I don’t fully realize that this moment, which seems mundane and innocuous on its surface, will affect my life profoundly for decades to come. This poem will influence my thoughts about what is possible in poetry and what is possible in language. I begin with the title: “They Feed They Lion.” Fresno disappears. The veiled membrane that separates worlds opens and the landscape of the poem stretches out before me. The grass turns to asphalt and concrete. And in the instant I read “out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,” I’m hooked. Here is a language that transports me and roots me solidly to the earth below. To be honest, I don’t know what the hell is happening in the poem. And yet, it sings to the working-class rage I’ve inherited, it sings to the rage I’ve...

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