Ohio

by Stephen Markley

Armies cascaded across the plains and planes died in beautiful violent violet clashes.

Beautiful sentence.

What an important lesson for every young person to learn: If you defy the collective psychosis of nationalism, of imperial war, you will pay for it. And the people in your community, your home, who you thought knew and loved you, will be the ones to collect the debt.

Maybe she’d acquired the bad habit of academicizing her memories, of trying to render them inert with the books she read and the theories she considered, but she recalled the days of her early twenties when her faith molted off like the dead skin of a snake.