Live Nude Poems

War in Iraq in Seven Vignettes Diesel exhaust from snow-topped Humvee, revving in winter darkness to leave Al Asad Marine base, ice crystals on the mouth of the turret gunner, blowing water vapor through pulled up black neck gaiter. We stop in traffic. I look left down a dusty street of houses. On the curb, a man with a thick black mustache bends to kiss a shamefaced girl-child on the mouth. She's held forward by extended armsof a white-robed man in red-checkered headdress. Cheerful medic cleaning the meat of a soldier's exposed bicep, exploded out like an anatomy diagram. Soldier sits in sand in pain, rolling the back of his head against the metal tread of an armored carrier. "You'll be fine," says the smiling medic. We all truly believe him. After the shock of IED blast, in an upturned vehicle four slack bodies with unconscious faces are slowly consumed by licking fire. We watch through the smoke-fogged, unbreakable bulletproof glass of ...

All Hallows' Eve Sky fades over distant dark forest, chaff of wheat blowing tans and darker browns across a frosty, fallow field where the promise of green growth once lived in the spell of earth moist and soft where spring seeds once opened like a heart on fire with love. Now oil lanterns glow through the old-field schoolhouse windows as autumn's twilight vanishes to dark. Children appear in the door to follow their teacher past the sparks of a bonfire, just lit by a father, to neighboring homesteads. Their eyes candles of expectation, the night sky cold, full of stars. An Army veteran, Steven Croft lives on a barrier island off the coast of Georgia. He is the author of  New World Poems  (Alien Buddha Press, 2020).  His poems have appeared in  Willawaw Journal ,  Canary ,  The New Verse News ,  The Dead Mule ,  Live Nude Poems ,  Quaci Press Magazine ,  Anti-Heroin Chic ,  Ariel Chart , and other places, and hav...

9 / 12 After the sky fell on the City, swelling its canyons, the talus slopes of smoke and carnage, the names of missing spoken as pleas into camcorders that swish pan to passing sirens, in the quiet towns and muted cities, tv screens blink images against our staring eyes. At Fort Stewart we clean weapons and watch CNN, fingertip smell of gun oil as hand reaches up, rubbing chin in thought, looking into this widescreen scry glass, any news of who did this to the staggering city predicting our future. "100 percent accountability" releasing us, I pass the parade field, sunset making a shadow over ground where a grove of crape myrtles, each named for a soldier, will soon grow, knowing safety can be counted, the months of it limited by news we will receive, that it's finite like grains in a bullet. Across the world, a desert moon none of us has seen yet rises over Sadr City....Now, years and all of our deaths later, I can look up, see it, feel it, its beau...

Alapaha When I take HWY 280 across South Georgia to Birmingham, choosing its sometimes lonely asphalt splitting forests of pine or farms flush with crops over the monotony of interstate and Atlanta's spaghetti interchanges, I make time to leave this slower road, buttoned by small towns of Main Streets, motels, and Dairy Queens, turn further south, find the even slower roads in the county of my grandfather's one room schoolhouse where he sat for eleven years and daydreamed of the river and pine woods of quiet deer and turkey calls, sometimes a bear, find the place he liked to go,behind the country church on the, even now, dirt road, down the river bluff in the rural place he was born into. I park at the church where he pulled his pistol on two angry roaming dogs, fired it into a tree, only wanting to scare them he explained, would only kill them if he had to: this lesson in spirits – trees, animals, people, ancestors -- best taught, felt, believed, here wher...

Day One After the roller-coaster dive out of the sky I remember that step off the C-130 ramp, jogging under generator lights, with the staccato of gunfire going like a movie soundtrack:  Baghdad International Airport Under Attack .  Waking, head on duffel bag, dawn’s light painting the mud brick building beside me, the major tells us thirty insurgents are dead just beyond the building I’ve spent my first night against.  Soon after, “prepare to move,” and we walk into this country, the weight of a year in my chest. KIA “Sergeant Edwards is dead,” As I awake before dawn, in the long tent’s double line of metal beds, I hear two soldiers already up and in uniform say it, “Sergeant Edwards is dead.”  I know it’s true.  He had just come to me to talk, but that was before I slept.  I don’t want to rise up, dress, walk down as they move along the aisle, to find the details.  And blessedly, in this moment I cannot rise – my body wo...