Issue 25 – 2014 – Jennifer Pierson

Jennifer Pierson

 

from Dispatches from the (War) Hospital

 

Nightwatch One

But in their brilliance angels do not lift us above our ruinance.

 

you arrive in the night

your body laid down and wait

 

a hand or a shoulder braces it

grief moves through us

 

as

our bodies lift your stretcher oh

 

the body moves the heart the hands how

rough they love

 

             (a careless angel hovers)

 
On the Way

no I

             lost it

along the way with blood and a lung

 

no reach for air

 

can no more take all I need in nor

wait to see home again

 

ants scurry to repair my open bones

 

my wife’s

              somewhere

 

they say you hear in a coma but

no words come in

 

my neck’s

broken

 

river flowing

 

               blue lights

white

 

it’s not the flat black you think

 
Post Traumatic Stress

holding you

your lanky

 

body shaking

above the chair

 

we place you in

 

never have we seen

such shaking

 

              offering you

now this garland

 

mass flow’ring

of forgetting

 
On the Bus

his head his

neck slashed

 

black: the cuts

               elegiac a

               scarf of loss

 

humanness seeps out

 

                **

as he turns

his cheek to show

the impeded bullet

 

             tears

             pool

 

he moves his mouth to say hello

 
Third Week in Iraq

Remote though your death days after denies us breath

 

last week’s manifest

your name crossed off

 

               too unstable:

bloodied lungs/shrapneled clavicle

 

we expected you

to fly to us

 

on the near-next arrival

                instead

 

this morning papers

wave your name/face

 

body unmanifest

to us untouched

 

(Shane Mahaffee, died May 2006)

 
Nightflow

Seepage

 

another seepage of sorrow

from off the shoulders of

               a mother

               a brother

seated away from us

while

out in the open the

father rigid

listens

               for the

              breathing

              of his son

 

(here come the angels asleep again lifting their burden)

 

2 AM

 
Need

Bring us alluvial

air to take in

clear us of dying

 

             Bad memory walks

             beside us

 

when we watch unbreathable

many and their arbitrary

wounded confused brethren

 

Oh wash us away our sins

 

Drone

the bone-saw with its necessary

teeth cutting flesh

 

flesh itself

flayed & falling off

 

the great gush of blood

splayed to the wall

 

the floor

sprayed with redred gauze

 

and here the seized-open-with-steel-claws

chest how righteous piteous

 

the heart and oh

infected the blemished

 

bones organs

 

(now nearing the sad mouth smell of loss)

 
Rushing/Balad Hospital/Arrival

Kick-up of sand/wind//

 

All is shadowed/then

the whick-whick of blades

as the helicopter lands

 

The medic rushes down/a bundle in his arms/rushes

 

to the medic/rushing/to take the bundle from his arms//

 

A foot

falls

off//

 

Blood and sorrow-pain/’s

carried into bright light //

 
Caesura

Sunday night

 

stretchers lined up in bright light

 

                               medics grow sleepy on them

 

a supervisor grimaces

 

then static becomes life

 

as two busloads of wounded pull up

 

 

How

 

How do you

 

look at a soldier

 

             whose left

 

eye’s gone missing?

 

 

Jennifer Pierson is a lifelong pacifist. During the height of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, 2004-2009, she was an AerVac volunteer at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, greeting and caring for the incoming wounded and their families. She teaches poetry to retirees at American University in Washington, DC.

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