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
in teal skies above Okinawa, bound for targets where
designated enemies live, raise families, fight, and burn.
I catch a whiff, avoid the full-on stench staged from a fortified island.
I see shadows, don’t part the veil for fear of seeing more clearly
the size of the weight pressing up and down on us and them.
Marry into the military, love travel, adapt to places where
I’m the foreigner and it’s normal not to belong,
instead of not belonging because I’m not normal.
The music I spin on armed forces radio and sing with
my American band dances at the edge of war.

S.Y. Ball is retired and working to finish her undergraduate degree after fifty years. Her poems have appeared in the Silver Birch Press Series One Good Memory and in the anthology Confluence from FootHills Publishing. She lives with her second husband in upstate New York. The Vietnam War shadowed her teenage years and her first marriage to an Air Force sergeant. They were stationed in Tokyo, Okinawa, and Taiwan during the last years of the war. Her poems “Last Dance”, “Shadow Dance”, and “Battle Dance” are her first attempt to write about her indirect but life-changing experiences of war.