Still

i.

July 7, 2013. It will be my birthday, on this day, soon. It was my birthday: 2012, 2011, 2010, and so on. I am in Boulder, Colorado. There was a two- day extreme heat warning in Phoenix, Arizona & it was very, very hot & I was very, very happy to be deplaned. June 30, 2013: instead of sleeping at Kari’s, a friend-of-a-friend in Boulder, I return to Tucson and sleep in our newly appointed room closer to the parking lot and less close to Emilio and Ashley, the ones who scream at 3 am on Thursdays.

ii.

The cops come.

iii.

Our place will feel deserted without me, like a ruin, he tells me.

Passing through so much paper. Going from hither-to-nither. How the bastard attorney trampled on my face, marking me dead, creating my funeral before its funeral. (Not even my boy’s silken hair remains in my hands.)

This new campsite does not have a tent, a bucket for peeing, fire, or a gun.

Still, shell shocked. Still, wet blood.

A group of silent documents are still in his black backpack & now miles away & really I do suppose their numbers will increase, as numbers do, and I hope to God they don’t. These past five months have been hell. February?8,2013-present.

Iv.

The enemy bombarded me, smashed me with hammers, crushed me with his Hummer, crippled my movement, transported my things to storage units: F20 and B2 & 4. I burst so many times and I kept bursting and I am bursting and it won’t stop (this bursting thing).

Billeted in a hut made of tree bark, sleeping in a bamboo hammock, I entomb myself in bags of sand, galvanized iron, & shrapnel.

v.

Goodbye.

vi.

When I crossed the document of transportation, the road was clearly no longer camouflaged in green burlap. The shellfire shot hard. It wasn’t the Germans. It was the Bengali, that other. Mt. Lemmon is not so far away Mission San Xavier Del Bac is neither. Yet… I am strange.

vii.

The Blacklidge house was spared. In this home, we wore gas masks. We hired a 24/7-gas guard.

The enemy and his attorney hired a spy to follow my whereabouts. I me andered, strolling through dry riverbeds and whizzing through puddles.

It is another day & I am shot in the foot, again. No damage done.?

For artillery is all around us.