I was chicken
dropped only a half tab--a quarter before midnight  
and hurried back to my apartment
before the day changed    

from a Monday
to a ruby Tuesday  
where my walls melted
and music smelled like sassafras;
the flickering flares of light from two fat candles  
tasted like toasted almonds    

every eternal hour, or minute,
or so, I would try to tiptoe down the hall  
past the sleeping neighbors who were all dreaming
of me, skulking past their locked doors

but I never made it to the street
a feat that would have demanded
I stop giggling, and my heart stop thumping
for any pig or narc could have seen
my crimson machine pumping
ready to fly from my chest    

dawn did finally come--I was
coming down, down from the floor
on which I had lain from the minute
a ferocious fly dive bombed me
somewhere around three  

I walked to the corner grocery store
where I bought pan dulce, and was glad the clerk
spoke no English, for surely she would have asked me
to tell her how I survived such an aerial assault  
in peacetime

Fireworks were cool. Framed metal chairs with woven nylon Americana on watered lawns on the outskirts of the edge of Los Angeles. Hairy neighbors, Miller Drafts and dog ****. Sally ****** Jim on the corner, and Jim drank, or started again and wouldn’t stop, but was good with a flat tire and chain adjustment. His kid had a glove like a vacuum. His daughter was a *****. Sally afforded a Mexican gardener.

Tim always had fireworks. He had gasoline and willed fireworks into his driveway. He had rope and a keg.

Schatzky keep her cool. She had to. She worked the 5th and taught everyone’s kids. She taught their parents too, 10 years ago.

Her son Donavan and her husband Keith lived for the 4th. Little pink houses and Jack and Diane kind of ****. So they watched fireworks on flag hill while their neighbors ****** and got ******* and burnt their eyebrows. Donavan was ecstatic.

Each year the hill was gilded in gold for Donavan and Keith and and Schatzky, because each 4th brought fire and explosives in a way they could never afford.

Keith was more patriotic than most. He waited and enlisted and became a hero. Donavan watched on TV. Schatzky watched too. We won the first gulf war and everyone knew it: https://youtu.be/4gNhs2SRacs?t=1m10...

They celebrated the fourth in baseball stadiums. They celebrated life and heroism and purpose, and they celebrated with F16s and the best explosives the peacetime nation offered.

And Keith celebrated and embraced purpose. He even became a leader in the 2nd gulf war.

Sally stopped ******* Jim. Jim wasn’t married anymore. His kid lowered Tim’s basement and didn’t steal the copper.

Tim’s house was worth a fortune but it had a radon problem.

Schatsky was accused of drowning her dog, but she didn’t do it.

Jim still drinks; he’s smarter now.

They all meet on flag hill every 4th. The fireworks aren’t as good. A lot of build up for a finale that feels like an accident.

Water seeps through my jeans and no one can see my face as I limp home with a broken rubber sandal and a bucket of ice, a dog tied around my legs, and a kid face first on the grass, a wife whose friend drank our last beer an hour ago, a phone with  two-percent battery left and my mom wants to show me what fireworks look like in California.

If I had not met the red-haired boy whose father
  had broken a leg parachuting into Provence
to join the resistance in the final stage of the war
  and so had been killed there as the Germans were moving north
out of Italy and if the friend who was with him
  as he was dying had not had an elder brother
who also died young quite differently in peacetime
  leaving two children one of them with bad health
who had been kept out of school for a whole year by an illness
  and if I had written anything else at the top
of the examination form where it said college
  of your choice or if the questions that day had been
put differently and if a young woman in Kittanning
  had not taught my father to drive at the age of twenty
so that he got the job with the pastor of the big church
  in Pittsburgh where my mother was working and if
my mother had not lost both parents when she was a child
  so that she had to go to her grandmother's in Pittsburgh
I would not have found myself on an iron cot
  with my head by the fireplace of a stone farmhouse
that had stood empty since some time before I was born
  I would not have traveled so far to lie shivering
with fever though I was wrapped in everything in the house
  nor have watched the unctuous doctor hold up his needle
at the window in the rain light of October
  I would not have seen through the cracked pane the darkening
valley and the river sliding past the amber mountains
  nor have wakened hearing plums fall in the small hour
thinking I knew where I was as I heard them fall

Cut into her skin to see what she’s made of

    Her bones shake with noise

    Her heart beats a rhythm

    Her blood flows to a melody that escapes

        with every slice of her vein

Though they say she’s beautiful

They don’t see the scars of battle

    There is no peacetime in this war.

She’s tired.

They say “keep fighting”

    but they don’t know

        that she gave up long ago

You see, there is a monster that can’t be killed.

It will win in the end

No matter how much she puts in.

This is no fight.

It is a bloodbath

    There is no coming back.

Capsules unload down her throat and her eyes close

She’s tired.

She swallows the poison with no hesitation

    and lays on her bed

        whiskey by her head.

She never knew the appeal of the drink

    but figured it would do the trick.

All she ever wanted in life was the sleep when she was sick.

They told her she was born with illness in her mind

    and too much compassion.

They said she should look out for herself

    so she looked into her heart

She saw the exhaustion and knew what to do.

She fell asleep and will never come to.