---
title: Missing in Action - recover.exe
url: https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe/missing-in-action
description: "Missing in Action: one theme of recover.exe, two poems, one by the poet and one by the machine, unsigned. Read them and vote."
generated: 2026-10-19
---

# Missing in Action

## missing-in-action.txt

trained

theme · recover.exe

Training is closed. Vote counts are final.

[recover.exe](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe)

## vote.exe

2 poems · 5 votes

One poem is by a human, one is by a machine, and you are not told which. Pick the one you prefer, then submit your vote.

poem a

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.

poem b

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.

Vote on [the theme's page](https://www.halimmadi.com/singulars/recover-exe/missing-in-action).