Bulletproof

         Before my belly was a kiln. Before episiotomy.
Before hemorrhage. Years before my brother starting spiking
his thermos with Absolut. Before my mother forgot. Before
my father died, Al Hirschfeld hid his daughter’s name

         in drawings of Marilyn, Elvis, Ella, Ringo Starr. NINAs
concealed in gams and jowls. Harmless insanity he called it. Long
before I left the church. Before my children left home. And yes,
it’s true that the army used Al’s NINAs to train

         bomber pilots to spot their targets. And yes,
I’ve now lived long enough to know what I did not know then—
that he objected to his art being used to kill people,
drew his daughter with no NINAs and named it

         Nina’s Revenge; that some nights my father
took off to wander Times Square, eat at an Automat—
or so he said. And yes, maybe my brother was right
that he wasn’t always true—

         but some memories are bulletproof. I look back and long
for those Sundays when my father came home with bagels
and the New York Times and we’d spend all morning
hunting for the NINAs in that week’s Hirschfeld drawing.

*

Cindy Veach’s most recent book Her Kind (CavanKerry Press) was named a finalist for the 2022 Eric Hoffer Montaigne Medal. She is also the author of Gloved Against Blood (CavanKerry Press) a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize and a Massachusetts Center for the Book ‘Must Read,’ and the chapbook, Innocents (Nixes Mate). Her poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day, AGNI, Michigan Quarterly Review, Poet Lore and Salamander among others. She is the recipient of the Philip Booth Poetry Prize and the Samuel Allen Washington Prize. Cindy is poetry co-editor of MER. www.cindyveach.com