Brian Turner

To yield force to is an act of necessity, not of will; it is at best an act of prudence. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau If you hear gunfire on a Thursday afternoon, it could be for a wedding, or it could be for you. Always enter a home with your right foot; the left is for cemeteries and unclean places. O-guf! Tera armeek is rarely useful. It means Stop! Or I’ll shoot. Sabah el khair is effective. It means Good morning. Inshallah means Allah be willing. Listen well when it is spoken. You will hear the RPG coming for you. Not so the roadside bomb. There are bombs under the overpasses, in trashpiles, in bricks, in cars. There are shopping carts with clothes soaked in foogas, a sticky gel of homemade napalm. Parachute bombs and artillery shells sewn into the carcasses of dead farm animals. Graffiti sprayed onto the overpasses: I will kell you, American. Men wearing vests rigged with explosives walk up, raise their arms and say Inshallah. There are men who earn eighty dollars to attack you, five thousand to kill. Small children who will play with you, old men with their talk, women who offer chai— and any one of them may dance over your body tomorrow.

The curve of her hip where I’d lay my head, that’s what I’m thinking of now, her fingers gone slow through my hair on a blue day ten thousand miles off in the future somewhere, where the beer is so cold it sweats in your hand, cool as her kissing you with crushed ice, her tongue wet with blackberry and melon. That’s what I’m thinking of now. Because I’m all out of adrenaline, all out of smoking incendiaries. Somewhere deep in the landscape of the brain, under the skull’s blue curving dome— that’s where I am now, swaying in a hammock by the water’s edge as soldiers laugh and play volleyball just down the beach, while others tan and talk with the nurses who bring pills to help them sleep. And if this is crazy, then let this be my sanatorium, let the doctors walk among us here marking their charts as they will. I have a lover with hair that falls like autumn leaves on my skin. Water that rolls in smooth and cool as anesthesia. Birds that carry all my bullets into the barrel of the sun.

Nothing but hurt left here. Nothing but bullets and pain and the bled-out slumping and all the fucks and goddamns and Jesus Christs of the wounded. Nothing left here but the hurt. Believe it when you see it. Believe it when a twelve-year-old rolls a grenade into the room. Or when a sniper punches a hole deep into someone’s skull. Believe it when four men step from a taxicab in Mosul to shower the street in brass and fire. Open the hurt locker and see what there is of knives and teeth. Open the hurt locker and learn how rough men come hunting for souls.