Names We Sing in Sleep & Anger

Like fishermen at dusk, the soldiers returned from war with stories slumped over their shoulders; their fingers firm at the knot, the netting, thick and tangled with the names of the dead. None could explain how the flood of life all around them escaped like water from between cupped hands, how the bodies of men they loved began to crust the earth like salt, how destruction danced slapdash and unashamed everywhere, and still they survived. When I came home from college proud, my educated mouth agape, a tackle box of words, slick and glossy and I saw the names of my friends, the young men I fought with, learned to drink with, and left behind Lil’Rocc, Pumpkin, Ulysses, Junebug, Aghoster names spray-painted throughout our neighborhood in memoriam, I couldn’t understand how a god could make one life possible and strip the world clean of so many, or how, like high-watermarks the dead remind the living of the coming of storms.