by Gale Acuff

In Sunday School today Miss Hooker told
the one about Moses parting the Red
Sea,

by Gale Acuff

After Sunday School today I walked home
as usual but it wasn’t really
because I got saved, at least I think so,

by S.Y. Ball

I prance in black hot pants and white go-go boots, sing 
for mostly conscripted soldiers with blood on their hands 
smeared upside the heads of dependent wives and off-base women. 

by S.Y. Ball

Desperate to stay focused on their beauty not their payload, 
I watch B-52’s take off, slant wings lifting as they rise higher

by S.Y. Ball

Yancy dies ten months after asking me instead of a cool girl to dance.

by Kevin Carollo

What I’m saying has nothing to do with my asylum request. What matters to you is the horror.  —Hassan Blasim

Furthermore, the translation’s back cover exuberantly offers a pageant 
of horrors, as haunting as the photos of Abu Ghraib. It feels like 1968 all over
again,

by Kevin Carollo

We soldiers were like sheep, fighting comic book wars. —Hassan Blasim

Does it matter that the above epigraph comes from a work of fiction? 
Is it important to know that the author was born in Baghdad and now 
lives in Finland?

by Layle Keane Chambers

I saw my son near Bangor ME, near St. John’s
near Keflavik and Faroe
climbing a bolted route through clouds

by Ben Corvo

(Dust Storm, Jerusalem)

All around, topsoil is blowing away.
The air is drawing close around us.

by Paula Friedman

Wakened by my father’s pacing,
I saw the strangest thing: 
layers of him had loosened 
like a lizard shedding skin.

by C.C. Garrett

At an early age, I knew freedom
Was not that much different from Hell.
Only a bit cooler.

by Sonia Greenfield

A concertina, like an accordion,
made music with air drawn
through bellows.

by Susanna Lang

Your neighbors won’t call this
a war,

by Andrew Shattuck McBride

I broached driving south so Mom could see birds
at a rest stop along the Rio Grande flyway.

by Andrew Shattuck McBride

Acacia koa, a tree native to Hawai‘i. Also, a warrior.

1.

After my tenth birthday and her move to the Mainland,
Kit—the younger of my two sisters—enlisted in the Army.

by Peter Schmitt

A double string of pearls is how my father described the runway lights his crew searched for,

by Peter Schmitt

Useless now: glass crystal melted and lost,
numerals against the charred face ghostly,

by Lisa Wujnovich

The trouble with 7th grade science was,
Mr. Stevens preferred his own voice

by Lisa Wujnovich

I am sixteen, in Florida, a lifeguard 
at the NCO Pool on Homestead AFB.
I tell myself, I will not go out with a GI.