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Contests : War Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2007 : Kate Duva
WINGS OF A BOY
He squeezes my cage. He pumps my breath.
His hands know the art
of the kill.
He brings me blind, veiny babies squirm-sleeping in their nest
squatters from today's luxury Home.
A plump mother dove lays frozen with fright in his hand.
He fits a box in the window. He slices a door to the world.
Now they have a home.
He never asked for America, America came to him.
He followed her and flopped with her on a pink bedspread
in a backwards time zone in a swarming city
of whirling dish-washers and wailing sirens.
Wow.
Jerkoffs in a whirlpool admire his scars.
His fingers climb the trail.
The black Balkans.
Power out.
Helicopters whuckled in the sky.
We'd pedal my sister's sewing motor
to light a bulb
to see our dinner: flour puffs.
Just flour, water and fire.
Once none was left when I got home. I gave my brother a bloody nose.
He nailed up a corncob bait. He looped horsehairs all around.
He slit the throats
of tangled birds.
Sparrow soup! It was either that or dirt.
In town they found a baba with half her blanket
in her stomach.
In his country I saw the shattered battered bricks where snakes made homes
green forests—by night black holes
shrouded women
military men of so many flags
sniffing circles of wild dogs
the river rolling on, dirty and sparkling
A fat man in a red Porsche—
a crazy lady cleaning dirt—
and sweet beetles screwing in dewy spiked flowers.
The situation? What did we know about the situation!
This was us:
He slaps his own face. He pops a salute
and the daze of a beast
of burden
He makes mother's milk:
the black-eyed dove has flown.
He mashes nut, apple and soy
strains it through my paisley scarf
pours the spew in a syringe
shakes it to make it warm
pecks my cheek
puts the wilted babies in my palm.
Jelly heads, tiny tapered rumps, and spindly proto-wings want to bloom.
They suck and strive. A black eye bud opens one crack, drunk on a sliver of light.
Their crops balloon, they turn purple and plop, yawning out needle tongues.
His soldiers charged a foreign virus. All his body burned.
One hot bottle of black wine, just what Baba would prescribe.
He crumpled to snot. I shielded him in kisses.
I kicked bodies.
I just kicked 'em.
There were
so
many!
1991 and my legs are fabulously scabbed
I'm wearing some tropical-colored garment that bowls over the bees.
Saddam, you butthole!
My schoolmates laugh. I run into a pole. His bunkmates kick him in the teeth.
We hid out in Krka a while.
So green. Waterfalls singing. We were the only men there and the birds
hadn't heard the news.
We fished with sticks of dynamite.
BOOM!
1991 and he's never had a woman
But the hands of men have been
inside
his thigh
He's a boy. He builds a pair of wings from plastic and leaps from a hill.
Before he crashes,
he flies.
I'm a girl and I titter with my puppy in the crotch of a tree.
I dig her a bed of dirt and fill it with flowers.
I fire up ants under a magnifying glass
and cackle as they die.
I watch dove chicks whirl down
the way of our turds
and I return to the laundry.
He returns to
I'm sad. I feel like I killed 'em.
He's a boy and he shovels up an ant village.
He plops it atop a rival colony and watches the frenzy
Deaf to their world war.
The dead feed the earth.
The dew's sucked up.
And when the sky turns purple
eggy plums plop ripe
on beds of nettles,
stories buried deep
as that
fire
core.
This poem was a finalist in the 2007 War Poetry Contest sponsored by Winning Writers. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Kate Duva
Kate Duva is a storyteller, schoolmarm, dancer and performance poet from Chicago. One day
while she was online researching poetry competitions, her husband walked in the door with a
mourning dove in one hand and a nest in the other, and the work "Wings of a Boy" was born.
For more from the Duva diaries, visit www.kateduva.blogspot.com.
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