WARTIME IRAQ: MEMORIES OF THE YUSIFIYAH TEMPORARY DETENTION FACILITY by Paul David Adkins

Source: Levi Clancy,

Our soldiers went missing one day.

We gathered, detained every Iraqi man
for thirty miles,

questioned each one
by one.

From the guard towers, prisoners seemed
like DeMille’s panoramic cast of thousands,
extras for Lawrence of Arabia.

But

when I walked
into that human mass
which smelled fully
the way I would expect
the meandering, polyped walls
of a living goat’s intestines

to smell,

when I knew, upon
the thirteenth hearing,
how to translate the Arabic
word for water,

while my own water
swirled inside its sweaty bottle
like an iced tornado,

when the soldier beside me
gagged beside the port-a-johns
brimming as soup ladles,

when an old man
toppled dead
in the 130 degree heat
of a similar john,
then stuck
to the floor
like a sneaker’s sole
in a dark theater,

when the AP reporter did not give
one shit
about anything
but

The Story,

surrounded as she was
on this raft of The Medusa,

when she cursed
the Thuriya’s broken
connection to the newsroom
in New York,

when I understood the next day
that I had canvassed
a living scene
of Bosch’s sweeping epics,

how tortured souls
reached to me,
an indifferent angel,

my silver sword of water sheathed
like a loogie
I was swilling
to spit into
that curdled swath of sky.
 

Author Bio: Paul David Adkins served in the US Army from 1991-2013. He holds a MA in Writing and Oral Tradition from The Graduate Institute, Bethany, CT. He counsels soldiers and teaches students in a correctional facility. Publications include River Styx, Pleiades, Longleaf Review, Connecticut River Review, Baltimore Review, and Whiskey Island.

Twitter: @koenigsburg14