Tag: Vietnam

Three Poems by Anna Abraham Gasaway

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Nara, Japan

Not like venison that hangs from the rafters
of your cellar, not like deer that walk
regally down their path and startle

and leap away when your foot scrapes the front
porch of the cabin in Julian, not like the lovey-
faced deer that nuzzle up to Snow White—no,

someone shaves these deer’s antlers off
so they can be hand-fed cookies that you buy
on-site. They’re aggressive, elbowing

their way forward, circling the tourists,
closing in around them. Sometimes, they mistake
a flyer from the earthquake museum

for those crunchy mouthfuls. Sometimes it feels
good to destroy. It smells of petting zoo,
like rabbit pellets in a dirty hutch.

I imagine my brother from Indiana
making short work of these brash animals,
picking them off, easy. Enough venison

to last the hard winter, enough to share
with family and church, enough to squander.
Even here, I’m American.

*

Vietnam 1966

My father volunteered to be a radio operator.
Maybe suicidal, more likely, oblivious,
thought because something bad
hadn’t happened to him that nothing could.
It’s said that the Viet-cong picked them off first,
broadcasting their location with glinting
antennae that reached up to the heavens.
A close friend of the family, an officer, saw
what my future father had done and got him
transferred which is why he worked callousing
his fingers on a manual typewriter,
we’re sorry to inform you instead of being
the one it was written about. Story
of white privilege, story of connections,
origin story, my coming to be.

*

The Dentist Tells Me I Have a Fighting Tongue

One that follows the scraper around
       and pushes its way between the scaler
like a mother when her child faces
       an abuser. He depresses it, still
it slinks around and sticks to the asp-
       irator and isn’t it better to have
a fighting tongue, than a pliant, cowed,
       submissive one, one that lies blank
as a sheet of paper to be written upon.
       My tongue will not be subdued, even when
it’s cut with a drill, even when the dentist
       places a bit in my mouth. It undulates,
it protests.

*

Anna Abraham Gasaway (She/Her) is an emerging disabled writer published in Frontier, Zone 3, Poetry International, ONE ART, Mom-Egg Review and others. She graduated from San Diego State University’s MFA program and serves as a peer reviewer for the Los Angeles Review. Her chapbook My Mother’s Husbands is due out from Finishing Line Press in 2026. She can be found on Instagram: @annagasaway.

Everything is Connected by Martin Willitts Jr

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Everything is Connected

It’s pointless to regret what might have been.
Just ask my father about the Second World War,
when his cannon backfired,
killing everyone else immediately, and leaving him deaf.
He knew what it was like to be covered in blood splatter.

I can picture my father, limp on red ground,
when some field medic, checking for pulses,
brings him back to safety. War explodes time.

I know the loneliness of choices,
as a field medic in Vietnam,
how survivors feel guilty making it alive,
other men never going home.

I can almost see my father
waking up on a cot in a hospital, unable to hear
some doctor asking, “Can you follow my finger?”
The doctor’s lips moving silently,
my father not responding.

I also know this story:

my father had a war buddy
who promised to fix him up with a woman he knew.
She worked in a factory where they made weapons
that helped increase killing.
When she witnessed all those wounded men
next to my father, she quit her job.
She became my mother.

When I received my draft notice for Vietnam,
my mother hid the mail. She knew war subtracts,
leaves some wounds you never see.

I volunteered to be a medic. I couldn’t imagine killing.

War numbs many of us. I know what it’s like
to walk through fields of dying and wounded men,
needing to leave the dying behind.
I touched death. It felt human.

My mother never forgave me for being that close to death.

My father never told me what it was like to be a survivor;
I had to learn the hard way.

My mother tip-toed around problems, biting her tongue,
frustrated with his deafness.

I could never tell my son about war,
although he loved playing with toy soldiers.
He might have thought it odd when I suggested
needing a toy medic, although he never said anything.

We never know where life goes,
and choices narrow into vanishing points.
Not being able to talk out issues
leaves scabs on a heart.

And, I have to admit,
I could not tell him the toll war had taken on me.
I could not talk about Vietnam for years.
I kept those secrets inside me,
a locket of misery.

I still have problems talking about it.

War creates another type of deafness.
I am trying to remove those bandages of silence.

It’s time to carry out the wounded.

*

Martin Willitts Jr is a retired Librarian living in Syracuse, New York. He was nominated for 17 Pushcart and 13 Best of the Net awards. Winner of the 2012 Big River Poetry Review’s William K. Hathaway Award; 2013 Bill Holm Witness Poetry Contest; 2013 “Trees” Poetry Contest; 2014 Broadsided award; 2014 Dylan Thomas International Poetry Contest; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, June 2015, Editor’s Choice; Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, Artist’s Choice, November 2016, Stephen A. DiBiase Poetry Prize, 2018; Editor’s Choice, Rattle Ekphrastic Challenge, December, 2020; 17th Annual Sejong Writing Competition, 2022. He won a Central New York Individual Artist Award and provided “Poetry on The Bus” which had 48 poems in local buses including 20 bi-lingual poems from 7 different languages.

He has over 20 full-length poetry collections including “The Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji” (Still Point Press, 2024); “Not All Beautiful Things Need to Fly” (Silver Bow Publishing, 2024); “Martin Willitts Jr, Collected Works” (FutureCycle Press, 2024); and forthcoming, “Bone Chills and Arpeggios” (March Street Press, 2025).

The Night You Returned by W.D. Ehrhart

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The Night You Returned

A road crew was paving the highway
the night you returned from the war.
It was March; they had set up floodlights;
the black viscous tar steamed in the cold.
The workmen didn’t notice you.
Why would they?
You weren’t any different
from all the other passersby that night
or any other night, just another car.
They had a machine;
they were laying macadam
mile after mile.
Black. Viscous. Steaming.
Mile after mile after mile.
Deep into the night.

W. D. Ehrhart is an ex-Marine sergeant and veteran of the American War in Vietnam. His latest book is Thank You for Your Service: Collected Poems, McFarland & Company.