The Burn Pit Detail at FOB Cobra

We stand in the Humvee’s steel bed

and heave bags of trash

with both hands

to the wide crater below.

             We throw piles of opened

             boxes sent from our mothers,

             the USO. We push out

the bent, rotting lumber

             left too long

             in the sun. We toss the torn

             tires of Humvees, the sandbags

that split in half—we burn

everything, and we stand

beside the blue smoke

of our war’s leftovers. After

the bed’s empty,

we light cigarettes,

watch outside the wire:

three hundred meters out,

past the four rolls of concertina wire

             in a wide field of desert,

             two of the stray dogs fight.

             They jump to their hinds,

mouths wide

             for each other, but between the flashes

             of burn pit smoke, they seem to be

             in a dance, a moment

before a kiss, though just when their lips

             could meet, the pit glows, the smoke

             thickens—we can only see

             their long shadows collide, fall.

At dawn, we’ll send a detail

to gather the dog who lost.

With snow shovels, they’ll scoop

the body into a double plastic bag.

To keep the dog

from becoming a bomb,

like everything,

they’ll dump it to the flame

and ash of the pit.