Corpses

 

            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