Outside Kuwait City (1991)
We came upon them mid-day,
in a rush for shelter from the petrol rain:
three corpses upright
in an armored personnel carrier,
as crisp as dime-store cigars;
their boots melted into the floorboard.
Oil fires illuminated a blast zone
surrounding the vehicle,
casting a perverse half-light
over the living and dead.
Some Marines took pictures
with the corpses,
souvenirs for the living back home.
We cracked jokes
to steady our nerves.
I kept watch
through the scorched, steel turret
frightened less by the dead
than the unseen.
Grandfather came to mind,
lying embalmed in a casket
in Enid, Oklahoma.
I was sixteen when he died.
The mortician overdid
Grandpa's makeup,
which cracked like desert topsoil
at his hairline.
I half-expected him to rise up
and scold the adults
for displaying him that way.
Someone passed around
the photographs.
The laughter stopped.
Thunder from approaching artillery
rattled our reprieve.
We shouldered our packs
and stepped into the poison rain.
A boot private
from Encinitas, California,
glanced back
as a helmet
tumbled from the carrier.
"Sucks to be them," he said.
**First published in As You Were literary magazine
and second-place winner of the 2023 Col. Darren L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards.
**Illustration by Morgane Xenos
