From The Machine Gunner’s Letters

How, you write, will I survive? With instinct, trigger-eye,

              the soldiers like turtles flipped over in the mud, limb-flail and broken

shell. These thoughts move through me as I write, a telegraph tape

              slipping through fingers. The lumberjack, they call me,

timber in the field, green blemished by red-splatter, like leaves at fall’s

       beginning. Behind the gun, I am eternity, I am time looking out

              from the inside of a clock, the click-stop finger that marks

the finish line. My body, knuckle-ache and recoil, records each loss,

       tally-marks on the black slate of the heart. I am the vomit-taste in the mouth,

              what they know is watching, though they race towards me as I

hand death out, a parade-master tossing candy to the crowd. Later, under star-

              flutter, the night opening parachutes as it falls, I have to pick, like needles

from a pin-cushion, the splintered death out of me. How once, I made

              your body gleam, the tongued lips, boot-polish on the nipples,

           your skin rubbed with orange peels. I could have, then, painted

beautifully. Now, even the most gentle touch dissolves, my finger harp-strumming

    the trigger, grenade pin held between the teeth. Love, all night the gun,

       cartridge oil, rivet, barrel clip, puts itself together in my mind.

              It’s so quiet out there, I can almost hear the maggots trash-

picking the fields, or the final woman-call a body makes. Someone should rat-

                     skitter through the foxholes, the moonstricken thistle-bush,

              and close their awful, glowing mouths. Someone should, mercy-

handed, swift, sew this trench-line closed. Tomorrow, more men will ladder

              the trench wall, mud-faced, horrible, caravan towards me in the dawn.

How will I survive? I will kill one man over and over until I’ve killed them all.