When the flowers were stolen from my uncle’s grave
my grandmother drove to our house and collapsed at our door
strangled as an empty Christmas stocking
wailing for her piece of coal
I have never seen a person so finished with God
Her face was a massacre of grief Her cries
like shoveled granite chewed through her shrilling throat
All they left was the flag, she kept screaming
I thought her lungs would start bleeding

It scraped my chest clean
Hollowed me for weeks
Our house was the echo of a mother
clawing the floorboards for her dead son
a downed forest in her nail-beds.

At night I obsessed over how long flowers
might survive in the hands of thieves
Spent a month scouring for answers in our basement
in the photographs of my father in Vietnam
He was as thin as a blade
his eyes unfiltered as the cancer they were given for free
Anyone could see, but the freckles in his shame,
that war was no place for a soldier

The heart is no place for the talons of the kind of secrets
you can only keep in the same chamber you will keep loaded
to keep your hands from shaking the ghosts of dead children awake.
My uncle wasn’t killed by a bullet.
he drank himself to sleep trying to drown out their tiny screams.
My grandmother followed him to the grave like every mother does.
I keep thinking of them today
As I sit in my parent’s living room
My father has been home from the hospital for a week
but I was just told he spent 3 years in a field of Agent Orange
but is refusing to accept his 10% veteran’s medical discount because
a true patriot knows cost of war.
pays for it himself.

I have written this poem before
but always through a window
never through an open door.
I find my mother by the stove stirring spaghetti sauce from a jar.
I have never heard her breathing pull this hard.

Earlier, in the car, while my father broke down she turned up the
radio dial to save him the embarrassment of his whimper
The radio was playing “I Wanna Sex You Up”
We listened to it at full volume for three minutes
it was fucking hilarious
how none of us heard the word

I don’t hear the words anymore.
The president announces the end of a war
and I just stare at my mother’s eyes as my father’s face falls into
the trembling trench of his hands, like a boy fresh out of bootcamp
who has just dropped his gun into somebody’s cradle.
When a war ends, what does that look like exactly?
Do the cells and bodies stop detonating themselves?
Does the orphanage stop screaming for its mother?
When the sand in the desert is melted down to glass,
and our reflection is not something we can stand to look at
does a white flag make for a perfect blindfold?

Yesterday I heard a story about a 6 year old girl in Iraq
who can’t sleep because
when she does she dreams of nothing but the day she watched her dog
eat her neighbor’s corpse
If you told her the war was over, do you think she’d sleep?
She’s seen teeth rip through a ribcage and swallow a heart
and I can buy dog tags at the mall,
I can buy camouflage at the Gap,
I can stare at the Vietnam Wall and forget
it is missing the 2 million names of the 2 million Vietnamese slain
So I can certainly forget about the little girl, her dog, the neighbor,
and whichever soldiers we choke-chained in the opposite
direction of God.

At 4 AM I find my father in the living room
the news caster says that the number of US soldiers killed in war this
month was outdone by the number that came home and committed
suicide.

Outside, there is a flag waving from our front door.
My father picked it out as carefully as he picked out my name
when he built our house.
I want to tell him that I still build my spine
from the clothesline that holds his work shirts.
But I know I’d start crying
I am exactly like him.
We both have wrinkles around our eyes, a hundred years older than our age.
We both carry ourselves like ambulances
with someone dead inside
hoping we’ll get there in time.
I didn’t get here in time.
This house echoes like an empty canteen.
flowers don’t survive long in the hands of thieves.
So much is wilting.

I look out the window .
My father’s flag is a glow in the moonlight.
I remember something I was told many years ago:

I was told in World War II,
80% of us soldiers could not bring themselves to kill
an enemy soldier they found
sleeping.
Sleeping.

I want to ask my father if he thinks that is true,
but I know he won’t sleep if I do.
And he needs to sleep.
God knows, we all do.