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  • Days of Spring 2016
  • Graham Barnhart (bio)

Another year refusing water to children.When they made the universal gesture for thirstalong roadsides he wouldn't stop.Could not he said to no one.A bombing at the gate before he arrivedwas just a story he knew about rubble.Passing through it he waved at the guardshired to die so he wouldn't when another bomb came.Afternoons, he worked with the physical therapistlearning to relieve pain by scrapingsore tissue with a slice of machined steelcurved to match the shape of the musculature.Like a cradleor scythe he said to no one.At night, Armenian contractors in roof topsandbag nests did not murmur or snore in moonlight.But he heard the smoke desertingtheir thin cigarettes, and they annotatedtheir watch-log when his styrofoam to-go boxsqueaked across the courtyard to the roomwhere he ate alone watching sun-driedbricks of opium dissipate their phosphorescentheat into distant courtyards but the samemoonlight of that still somehow sacred country.And that was how morning found him,sometimes a cradle, sometimes a scythesomehow bright as the nights were silent. [End Page 141]

Graham Barnhart

Graham Barnhart, a Wallace Stegner Fellow in Poetry, received an MFA from The Ohio State University after serving tours in Iraq and Afghanistan as an Army medic. His work has been awarded The Jeff Sharlet Memorial Prize for Veterans, the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize and has appeared in Adroit, Diagram, The Gettysburg Review, The Sewanee Review, Poetry Northwest, Waxwing, and others.

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