Breathe it Out (loosely)

In-Country

Gabby
I screamed out for you
Under
A blood burning moon
And all I
Could see was mortar rounds
Cutting
Into opulent stars
Exposed fat drooled out
From my mouth shaped wound
And flowed in the paddies already stained
In Quang Tri provincial, Indian Country rain
Mixture creating ambush manure
For a brown rice stronghold, Viet Cong owned home
Methodically the medic snaked to my side
Put his hand to my face, put an end to my voice
“Stop screaming, Chief. It’s just a fucking scratch.”

But I was leaking electricity
through my ribcage. Field dressing swelling
like punji snake infection in a pond of spring
Engorged by the form of the melted plains
With a furious desire to deedee open holes
Gashed in the country by our C.O.’s
They hide what blooms abject and naked
Fingers in my wounds freshly awakened


Fluorescent lighting filtered through my
flaking eyelids
Hospital walls with
white painting flaking, exposing naked
faces who told me
“Two weeks of lying
here in this bed.
5 all together will get you up
and back in to the field.”
Like Mangas on his last legs, boiled in fragments
My scalped crawled with distrust
Baptized by their rust

And as the time of my first night
Drew out like a blade forever
Denton armless Texas Sam sat up next to me
in his bed
full of fermenting urine
The invalid prophetic, storyteller told me
“watch out for the cockroaches
They’ll crawl up
In your catheter if they think that you’re dead.”
I knew he was right
before I could see them
cause the boy woke me up on that first night
screaming and thrashing
his stumps in the air
I shook him and pulled a bottle of jack from under my bed.
Put it to his face and he said,
“Thanks, chief. I ain’t big on Indians, but I got sense enough to thank a friend.”

“Charlie
Motherfucking
Viet-Cong
got me
with a
bouncing betty.
Now I’m a
Man sized baby."


The best thing about Sam
Was the way that he talked
Though he was just 19
still a boy
he could make me laugh so hard
I wanted to cry

With his back to the sky in the enema room
Nurses reaching in him
he said, “just go in your bed
or they’ll dig in you too.”

And one night on the ward
Color out my face
Melted into a haze
And everything felt just like
It was held together

By waves and I felt
That I couldn’t see
Sam when he told me
Why he didn’t like Indians

"Tina was about 12 when it happened to her
They plucked her out of our yard
Took her out on the road
And their truck blew a hose
And they junked both of them
Just like trash


But, I never saw her cry…

In from the country out on the road
They raped my sister in a broken Ford
Mestizos dwelling on the drainage of time
Sucked back their oil from Tina’s hide
But my granddaddy took it like you would from a child
Who plays with fresh gold just to watch it shine
And though I never saw her cry
I could see the rawness between her thighs
Like the color of
the rust
on the truck
She slept in
Across the cracked
Vinyl seats
The stuffing her only source of heat or clothing
She spent the night naked cause two snakes were waiting
Out by the old well where she played on her swing set
That we tore down when she fell


And now her rust colored thighs
are imprinted on my eyes
Her rust colored thighs
They'll never leave my mind

In this country or out in the country or Indian Country
it doesn't make a difference
Raped without repentance senseless
Fucking girls who can’t have kids yet
And If I had just two simple wishes
I would get my arms back with them
And strangle those motherfucking Injuns
Cause that’s just what they deserve