Peacetime
Buy Issue for $25 at JHUP- Peacetime
The Memory
At breakfast he reads about isis,Air strikes and mutters, “Another war,”Then finishes his stewed prunes,Remembers the powdered eggsHe ate after Pork Chop Hill,The dead bodies in the coffins of snow.Washing the bowl, he wishes he couldWash away the memories of Korea: the manHe killed, plunging his bayonet intoHis gut, the hand-to-hand combat,The intimacy he lives with still.
Two Worlds
Tractor ruts stretch acrossThe cornfield where cut stalksJut like empty cartridge shells.He can never be free of the war,Never continue his life withoutAfghanistan appearing in the fields,On the roads, the bombs there, not there.How long can he live in two worlds,Kabul, Kansas, his son as old asThe boy with a grenade he shot?“Wipe the war away,” he orders,“Live through the nightmares,Wake with my wife beside me.” [End Page 640]
Michael Miller served in the U.S. Marine Corps during 1958–1962. His poems have appeared in the Kenyon Review, Raritan, Yale Review, and New Republic. His most recent book of poetry is The Different War (Truman State University Press), from which the title of this issue, The Architecture of Death, was taken.
