We can still hear the planes’ deathknell hum— circling our heads like we were carrion, despite the pictures, which know only how to tell one truth at a time. Our names were napalm, ravaged paddies, lung cancer. Names, like ghosts, reverberate. The bad memories in the body? They climb to the surface, from war’s muck. War: the only surname on our unmarked graves. Our sustenance amidst your savage freeze. So we married fear, salvaged these small lives. We’re free, at least, to dream of the fires that made us by splitting the us we almost, some days, remember.
