Letter Composed During a Lull in the Fighting by Kevin Powers

Meditation on a Main Supply Route
    I recall Route Tampa going on
    in a straight line all the way
    out of the war.
    A hundred MSRs
    with names once so unpronounceable
    they are now called Chevy and Toyota;
    their attendant smells
    and voices arrive
    in such disparate places
    as Danville, Virginia;
    Monterey, California;
    Steubenville, Ohio;
    Weslaco, Texas;
    Fayettevilles
    of both North Carolina
    and of Arkansas;
    the Bronx, New York,
    where Curtis Jefferson’s
    cauterized face still burns
    as he wraps his lips
    around a straw to drink his juice
    and his muscles wither and he wishes
    he had died instead of living
    houseboundbedboundmindboundbodybound
    like a child, watching
    as his mother watched
    the roads, pitted and seeded,
    arrive as one road in front of his house,
    get out of a black sedan
    with GOVERNMENT USE license plates
    and become two men
    walking up the front steps
    of the converted brownstone,
    where they wait. And the roads
    reach out to Steven Abernathy
    in the factory where he works,
    after, on C shift, forever, and Steven
    saying to the old intractable drunks he works with
    that all pain is phantom and that’s all
    as he cleats the red knuckle of his leg
    into the stirrup above the plastic rest of it,
    before they take him to the VFW post
    for a PBR on them at least twice a week,
    now almost daily for a month,
    arriving in the glare of six a.m. light
    off the quarter panels of their rusted trucks.
    Sometimes by noon the old men say Vietnam
    and he says, I lost my leg
    on the goddamn MSR and old Earl Yates says,
    Naw, they took it, the fuckers.
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    I am home and whole, so to speak.
    The streetlights are in place along the avenue
    just as I remembered
    and just as I remember
    there is tar slick on the poles
    because it has rained. It doesn’t matter.
    I know these roads will work
    their way to me. They may arrive
    right here, at this small circle of light
    folding in on itself where brick
    and broken sidewalk meet.
    So, I must be prepared. But I can’t remember
    how to be alive. It has begun
    to rain so hard I fear I’ll drown.
    I guess we ought to
    take these pennies off our eyes,
    strike into them new likenesses;
    toss them with new wishes
    into whatever water can be found.

Improvised Explosive Device
    The blast from an improvised explosive device moves at 13,000 mph, gets as hot as 7,000 degrees and creates 400 tons of pressure per square inch. “No one survives that. We’re trying to save the kids at 25 meters and beyond.”
    â€”Ronald Glasser in the Army Times
    If this poem had wires
    coming out of it,
    you would not read it.
    If the words in this poem were made
    of metal, if you could see
    the mechanics of their curvature,
    you would hope
    they would stay covered
    by whatever paper rested
    in the trash pile they were hidden in.
    But words or wires would lead you still
    to fields of grass between white buildings.
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    If this poem were made of metal and you read it, if you did
    decide to read or hear the words, you would see wires
    where there were none,
    you would pick up the slack of words, you would reel
    them in, pull
    loose lines
    until you stood in that dry field,
    where you’d sweat. You would wonder how you looked
    from rooftop level, if you had been targeted.
    If these words were buried beneath debris, you would
    ask specific questions, like, am I in a field of words?
    What will happen if they are unearthed?
    Is the entire goddamn country full of them?
    Prefer that they be words, not wires, not made of metal,
    which is almost always trouble. If these words should lead you
    to the rough center of a field,
    you’ll stand half-blind
    from the bright light off white buildings,
    still holding the slack line in your hand,
    wondering if you have been chosen.
    You’ll realize that you both have been and not,
    and that an accident is as much of a choice
    as saying, “I am going to read this poem.”
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    If this poem had wires coming out of