Selective Service

We rise from the snow where we’ve lain on our backs and flown like children, from the imprint of perfect wings and cold gowns, and we stagger together wine-breathed into town where our people are building their armies again, short years after body bags, after burnings. There is a man I’ve come to love after thirty, and we have our rituals of coffee, of airports, regret. After love we smoke and sleep with magazines, two shot glasses and the black and white collapse of hours. In what time do we live that it is too late to have children? In what place that we consider the various ways to leave? There is no list long enough for a selective service card shriveling under a match, the prison that comes of it, a flag in the wind eaten from its pole and boys sent back in trash bags. We’ll tell you. You were at that time learning fractions. We’ll tell you about fractions. Half of us are dead or quiet or lost. Let them speak for themselves. We lie down in the fields and leave behind the corpses of angels.