Retrieving the Guns

1.

When you leave for the third time
I drink pink wine and shuffle along

the hall we painted orange, a color
to keep us warm. I sing

I don’t know how to love him, and I
really lean into it, this pain

that comes with each departure, bright
and clear as a sudden bruise.

Before your first deployment,
you spent about a year

training. When you weren’t flying,
you wandered the squadron,

searching for a place to sit. Each day,
the corn grew taller in its fields.

You emptied
the trash, and you waited.

2.

Part of your love for me
is formed from the same impulse

you have to sprint to a burning car.
Just like your ex-wife’s

need for you, my need
for you gives you something

to shovel towards. When you leave,
I sit in our dusk-gutted house

and wait for night. You write,
Send my jacket, please. The desert

is cold. Years later, when we
have better phones, you strain

for a signal, crouch on your heels
by an Al Udeid dumpster. Winter

in Omaha is cruel as a trap
I worry at each day. Please come home.

3.

It’s April. You’re in civilian clothes
at a Qatari prince’s mansion

on the Persian Gulf, and there are Sea-Doos.
Is this war too? I can’t imagine you

in swim trunks, can’t see anything
but your tan flight suits, your stiff blue

PT gear, but when you packed, you must have
included slacks and a button-down

shirt for trips into Doha. You buy
a hookah downtown and ship it back

to the States. You write, Some nights
there’s nothing to do but read books

in my bed. Some days there’s nothing
but sea.

4.

Monday nights after class
I go with Dora and Scott

to the Homy Inn where there are peanuts
in dog bowls and pitchers

of champagne on tap. The echo
of cigarette smoke perfumes

the whole room, and if
I strain, I can be

just a normal 26-year-old, eating oranges
from pints of Blue Moon.

5.

When I met you, you were already
six years enlisted. You

were my winter boyfriend, but when the time came
to break up, we moved

to Texas instead. The strip club flushed
our apartment pink every night. We were married

in the Garden for the Blind.

6.

Every day there are more deaths
reported. We exchange emails. You write,

They didn’t have peanut butter cookies
at the mess hall today. War

is hell. I picture you
in the sky, the refueling jet twinned

to your plane. You over the radio, over
Anbar, over a burning village with high

concrete walls. You eat beef jerky
and Snickers bars, cash in your three

drink tickets after debriefings,
sleep well past the dawn. Smoking hookah

with Dora, I drop the embers,
and they incandesce in a sudden bright

crown. Sometimes this city feels like light
in my mouth. On the news

another helicopter is down.

7.

Before the initial invasion,
the small college where we met

hosted a pro-war rally. You walked,
stunned, through the posters

and chants. I didn’t think much of it
then, but I was not your wife yet,

and the dead still had
their warm bright hearts

beating like wings in their chests.

8.

In the auditorium the base commander
addresses the wives, saying, Here we value

faith first, and then family, and then freedom.
Faith: the black limbs of elms bowing

under snow, Omaha in January, the air
so bracing it steals itself back

from my lungs. Family: Dora at the Waiting
Room Lounge, whiskey and 7-Up

and too much fun, Sheila says, or so
she’s heard, her eyes big, bovine

with concern. Freedom: summer, a river,
your hands. Rewinding

the tape past each explosion.
Retrieving the guns from the men.

9.

The thread that connects us,
golden and thin,

from the fist clenching me
in the middle of my country

to the dunes of sand
that rise like waves

around yours, is the relief
we share that, for you, war

is something that happens
in the black currents of air

over the Persian Gulf or Hindu
Kush, high above the Humvees

and roadside bombs and calls
to prayer.

10.

Your first job was loading bombs
onto Strike Eagles. There are photos of you

on the flight line in your coveralls
in wind, in snow and sleet, on days

so hot you iced yourself in the bath
after your shift ended. When you enlisted

it was still the ‘90s, and airmen could go
a whole career deploying once, maybe

twice. Now, you’re home for a handful
of weeks before you leave again, and this

is what you know: that your first marriage
is to the sky, that one wife left

and the other stayed, that it is better
to die in a spiral dive, the inner ear

bobbing obliviously
as the plane falls like a winged seed.