11E10

V.P. Loggins

So the first thing they did
was give each of us a number,
mine 11E10, and march us to

the barber and cut off our hair, 
young Samsons, the lot of us,
the hair gathering randomly

on the cold tiled floor, clouds
of the stuff wisping in a breeze
created by the barber’s feet

as he circled you and the chair,
like Dante in the underworld,
until he said “You’re done”

and you stood up, cut down,
rubbing your palm across
the sharp and prickly sphere 

of stubble left to be known, 
from that moment on, as you,
a number for your name.

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V.P. Loggins is the author of The Wild Severance (2021), winner of the Bright Hill Press Poetry Book Competition, The Green Cup (2017), winner of the Cider Press Review Editors’ Book Prize, The Fourth Paradise (Main Street Rag, 2010), and Heaven Changes (Pudding House Chapbook Series, 2007). He has also published one book on Shakespeare, The Life of Our Design, and he is the co-author of another, Shakespeare’s Deliberate Art. His poems have appeared in The Baltimore Review, Crannog, English Journal, The Healing Muse, Memoir, Modern Age, Poet Lore, Poetry East, Poetry Ireland Review, The Southern Review and Tampa Review, among other journals. About “11E10,” Loggins writes, “‘11E10’ is a reminiscence of the first day of my active military duty, when I arrived for basic training at Fort Knox, Kentucky.”