Read More: A brief interview with Aaron Graham
Mythos (Deployment)
The epicenter
might be
a minaret
woman’s veil, voices
selling dates,
road-ways tamped
packed with feet
where waiting,
still the magnitude hits.
A thousand years stretch
down this street
this town, the same
ground waked by Paul
blinded he saw
God spoke place.
Words here make
sense only if kept
aside myths
in your head.
Camel rides, bouncing
in a pickup truck bed
as it passes.
Footfalls
We trod the pavement in a dead patrol.
The deep desert has no edge.
The third day over the line, the third day
outside the wire: horizons merge, the cusp
of bright firmament and eviscerate earth.
Where being and not being impossibly
touch:
the IED you walk past
the IED you brush
Distance collapses under a sun’s
glare. This place is also a world’s
end. Al-Anbar is also a world’s end.
Never and always: this intersection
overtaken by the suddenness
that is blindness in the early
afternoon, a sun that is sightlessness
in the dusk.
The sun is immediate. Its glare is
immediate. The sand, hills, ordinance, and […]
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Aaron Graham hails from Glenrock, Wyoming, population 1159, which boasts seven bars, six churches, a single 4-way stop sign and no stoplights. His work explores the relationship of desire, compassion and violence in combat situations and the resilience, latency and impact of trauma and moral Injury on maritime society. He served as the assistant editor for the Squaw Valley Review, is an alumnus of Squaw Valley Writers Workshop and The Ashbury Home School (Hudson) and is a veteran of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where he served with The Marine Corps’ Human Intelligence and Counterterrorism Task Force Middle East as analyst and linguist. His work has appeared in SAND, The Tishman Review, The East Bay Review, Print Oriented Bastards, Zero-Dark-Thirty and f(r)action. His first book “Blood Stripes” was a finalist for Tupelo Press’s 2015 Berkshire Prize. Aaron is currently finishing his PhD in Literature at Emory University.
Read More: A brief interview with Aaron Graham