Joanna Grant is a Collegiate Associate Professor and Wandering Scholar for the University of Maryland. She teaches college classes to US soldiers in deployed locations around the world. She has worked in Japan, Kuwait, Afghanistan (twice), Djibouti, and South Korea. Her work has appeared in Prairie Schooner and many other journals.---------
Getting Hot Out There Now It Looks Like
FOB Shank, Afghanistan
If you run fast you can get yourself a place to sit.
An old ammo box, a dusty cot, a cinder block.
If you’re slow you just have to hunch up at the end,
scraping your head against the bunker’s ceiling.
That night it hit so close I sat across from Carl.
Carl has a hard time with names. All those Greek and Roman
names don’t stick with him for nothing but he’s a wonder
with his hands. The commander brought him here
to fix that plane that ran off the runway’s end and crumpled
like some old soda can thrown out by the side of the road
somewhere close to Birmingham. Where we both used to live.
His family worked in fire and metal. Feeding the furnace at Bessemer.
Shooting sparks on assembly lines. Riveting. Welding. Building the ships
down on the Gulf Coast. He smiles every time I mention Hephaestus.
Although he can never remember his name, he knows all about
the glow and reek of steel. You think it’s hot in here, he says.
Back in Iraq it hit 140 easy. In the shade. I saw some things there.
They put us to work rebuilding. Saddam’s old palaces and things.
They tasked us to adapt them. Make them into headquarters and such.
This one palace where we stayed. Well the locals said. You had to do it
every year. If your number came up, you had to hand over your girl.
Your baby girl. The girls was about ten or twelve years old.
They did whatever they done with them and you’d never
see them again. What they did—they let you choose
the way your girl would die. That’s all. I thought about that
the other day when you was talking about those boys and girls
the Athenians had to send to feed that monster that lived
under the palace. Boom off in the distance, unrolling slowly.
The Minotaur, I tell him. A monster born of unnatural desire.
Oh yeah I seen some things, he says, resettling himself.
I took a bunch of photographs. I’ll burn you some.
Now just don’t go showing them around.
Some of them I wasn’t really supposed to take. I promise.
Lord they had some heat there, he murmurs. A hundred and forty easy.
More like and hundred and fifty down by the flightline.
The all clear sounds. It’s late. I send the students home.
Off into the blackout. Two days later I find the DVD on my desk,
neatly labeled “Baghdad, Iraq, ’09. Carl Robinson.” I still can’t find
a drive that will play it. That will open the files.
But still I carry it with me. Images burned into the mind’s eyes.
Seared into the disc that sits on my desk. A shining circle of lead.