Generation of Guns

(with Brad Burjan)

Sometimes these bones

are strangers, touching
each other in the night
like blind/deaf lovers.
They call each other
by name, their words
Morse code vibrating
into fresh cells.

 

Like frightened armies
cut off at the river,
they move together
in the trenches, faces
smeared with mud,
limbs articulated
with their sentences
hovering
in the open mouth
of the air…searching.

 

Legions of men rise
and fall in this mist,
this place of stopped
time and stolen history,
exhaling the exposed
wounds we’d rather
not carry.

 

All that dried blood
of reality pools
and hardens in
cold chambers—
in a generation of guns
now frozen in the memory’s
trigger and I’d rather shoot
the teeth out of love
than admit defeat or truth.

 

So
I’ll just sit here
choking on every syllable
that weighs down
my throat, and cease
to resist destiny.

 

Aleathia Drehmer/Brad Burjan

Published by Red Fez, Red Reader #1