Missing in Action

They sent a flag folded into a triangle, all the corners where his hands used to be. We keep him in the present tense because the army won't give us a verb to bury. Missing— as if he wandered off mid-sentence and might come back with the rest of it. My mother sets a plate, the chair keeps its appetite. Somewhere a field holds him the way water holds a thrown stone: the surface healed, the bottom rearranged. We don't say dead. We say the jungle is still deciding. We say the war forgot to tell us how it ends.

the reports of my death are greatly exaggerated yet fall short of the glorious reality the way it really went down: how i blazed into the mosh pit of hairy chests rubbing, flipping mountain-bodies, human bears connecting punches — poetry is brutal, and i would have won had it not been for these weak arms, my short breath, this heart set on feeling.