Some Days
Nestor Walters
you’re not a poet the voice says
go back to bed. a real poet doesn’t slip
into a sleeve-holed sleeping bag
he got in the Navy, stare at an empty page
on the dining table, scrape dried food,
pick his nose with the same finger, sit there
like that, listening to falling drops
in the quiet after rainstorm
and the couple making love at dawn
(or maybe it’s sloppy running)
while still picking his nose. he’d never need
to cover his bookshelf with a blanket
to avoid distractions, look for poems
in glass smudges, in the sonnet collection
she left him before she left, or in the notes
on the envelope from his overdue mortgage.
he’d never have to guard his notebook
from a storm, his secret little diary
hunched over to scrawl:
a bicycle locked to a mossy fence
weed stalks shining with crystal dew
clouds that are going to rain all day
and maybe the next
*
some days are like this––
you’ve overslept, spent all morning on
a poem, find all you did was copy
an old journal entry, and last year’s dream
isn’t that interesting after all. your walk ends
with no revelations, shoes soaked through,
the sky stays gray. no matter how hard
you try, rain drops smear the page
you promised you would turn.
still, you come home, shower
eat a bowl of cold
then, sleeping bag over shoulders
sit to copy notes of
weed stalks shining with crystal dew
clouds that will rain all day
and maybe the next
The Husband Who Came Back from the War
Nestor Walters
—after Connolly’s “A Sharp Breath of Birds”
in a story about two women
who grow up together playing
make-believe birds, who play bird-
bandits, princesses, dove-maidens,
sea nightingales and seven sparrows–
that is who he is: the husband who
came back from the war. the women,
yearning to be free, blossom with scarlet
and crimson wings, they fly, while he:
husband. back from war.
–
the husband who came back from
the war, as if, by those eight words
we can guess his favorite chew brand
or his mother’s favorite flower, if
he even has a mother, this husband
who came back from the war. who
cares where he hid his first dirty mag,
what initials he once tenderly carved,
or when he first realized it hurt to cry.
because he keeps to himself, this husband.
that easy dismissal, the subtle wink,
you know, back from war, meaning:
–
he saw some shit, has a thousand-yard
stare, jumps at broken plates, shadows,
backfired motors. or wakes up screaming
night after bottomless night, reaching
for a rifle that is never there. his stories
begin with there I was, knee-deep
in grenade pins, or he’s in a wheelchair,
or a brothel, or on a shrimp boat screaming
is that all you got? to a perfect storm.
the husband who came back from the war.
the wife who grew wings and flew away.
and then? you know, so it—
–
a scalpel from his med bag
on the bathtub ledge, his blood
a rorschach smeared on the floor.
a pill bottle, orange and opaque
empty, next to an empty
handle. or he tastes the carbon
of a well-oiled pistol. or
a jeep with a roll cage revs
in a closed garage with him,
the husband, in the driver’s seat
for the last time it will hurt to cry.
–
but in this movie, the scalpel breaks.
in this one, the bullet half-strikes,
the engine is out of gas, sputters
and dies. he vomits up the pills
and whiskey, stares at them, the
little moons floating in his bile
on the carpet. he closes his eyes.
he wakes up in pale blue light: morning,
not at the far end of a tunnel. he kneels,
pulls weeds from his garden
one by one, finds himself
–
proud of the small victory, he plants
geraniums, daffodils, daisies,
decides he wants to watch them
grow. he goes to therapy, finds
husbands, wives, brothers,
sisters, sons and daughters, back
from the war, who tell him he doesn’t
have to be alone anymore. maybe
he dates a guy, adopts a kitten, starts raising
organic marijuana. or goes back to school,
studies botany, herpetology, basket
weaving. maybe he writes
a poem. maybe he builds
a birdbath in his garden.
five ways to kill a mouse
Nestor Walters
we burned the one in the sticky trap. it struggled
against its tiny legs, writhing flames, fluttering
like cloth in a strong wind. i didn’t
tell her this, the girl on my dorm room couch. i said,
they were eating our food, you know.
but you tortured them, she said.
i told her we lived in a shelled-out schoolhouse
and woke up to machine-guns pattering the roof.
that’s different. before you said you
tortured mice on deployment. i nodded
but stayed quiet. one we drowned
in a water bottle trap. i showed her on the wine
where we cut the plastic cone to fold inside,
so it would crawl after the bait but find
no way out. one time, she said, i rescued
a hummingbird from my cat.
another one we kept as a pet for some time, on a leash
of gutted paracord, until someone got bored and
swung it in wide circles. it survived, poor bastard.
we smashed it into walls, floors, the rusted
dump truck, each other.
did you enjoy it?
you have to understand, i told her, they were eating
our food. not that we would starve. but it was hot
and they were shooting at us, and some days you came back,
if you came back at all, to find chew-holes scragged in
your favorite mre, in boxes and bags, socks and shirts,
the picture sent by your sweetheart––nothing.
and we hated mres. nobody hates mres
more than deployed marines. but we hated having them
taken even more. one of them we crushed.
he was lucky. two gurgling breaths
and he was gone. the last one
was near the end. we were packing
boxes in the command suite––the classroom in the
shelled-out schoolhouse with the most walls intact.
someone saw him and slid a box across the floor.
stunned, but still alive. someone bet
fifty bucks i wouldn’t bite his head off. someone
else, another twenty-five. i probably could have
made more. i set the skull in my teeth. the body
pulled away gently. nothing ragged
or gushed out. i was surprised
by how easy it was.
Nestor Walters was born in Bangladesh, raised in Greece, and served ten years in the U.S. Navy. He now studies applied mathematics as a graduate student at Stanford University.
ISSUED 