to living, I've seen their lives transform,
which never happens when they commit
to other things, like death, how death,
sometimes, is the military, is its memory,
ten killed when my body was owned
by them, those who mispronounced
my name every chance they could,
turning the letters upside-down and
backwards, and when the veterans commit
suicide, it's so silent, so absent from the news,
so absent from the poems I read out there,
as if the vets never commit suicide, as if
there are no such things as vets, and I've
only had one teacher in my entire life,
my entire life, from kindergarten to PhD,
one teacher who was a vet, a Navy guy/
philosophy teacher who told us about seeing
a kid, a child, really, because we were all
children during the war, at least my war,
his war too, and this kid running on a flight
deck, how you were told to never run on
a flight deck, and he did, and the airplane's
propellers, he said, were invisible when they
were on, moving so fast that they seemed to
disappear, and then this child disappeared,
and he used that word, how I thought of
magicians, sawing a woman in half,
the violence of magic, where, in the end,
everything turns out to be all right, and,
I thought, how the military, if you ask me,
is the opposite of magic, the exact opposite.


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