No Take Backs

By Ben Weakley

Afghanistan rides in across a pristine sky
like some bare-chested western god throwing
bolts of lightning, except this time he’s hurling

leftover rockets from Soviet days
until he slams one into a dusty path
on Forward Operating Base Salerno

and it bursts into a thousand fragments
where a twenty-five year old lieutenant—
the guy who runs the motor pool,

who spends his days hunched over spreadsheets
ordering spare parts, who has not fired his weapon,
who left at home his baby boy—is walking.

He arrives at the hospital in the back
of a dirty white pickup truck
and the big voice on the FOB calls for blood

type O positive and the soldiers line up
around the aid station. A dozen units
and he still bleeds out. It is Sunday.

He’d been taking his dirty clothes to the laundry.

I look at Afghanistan and his smug grin
pressing the wrinkles into his eyes,
and I say, What the fuck was that about?

Afghanistan chuckles at this silly game
we’ve played for years. He never forgets
the score and there are no take backs.

He says, Gotcha that time, fucker.

****

Ben Weakley spent fourteen years in the U.S. Army, including deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.

His work appears in the anthology, "Our Best War Stories" published by Middle West Press, LLC. Other poems appear in The Wrath-Bearing Tree, The Ekphrastic Review, and Vita Brevis, among other publications.

Awards include first place in the 2019 Heroes’ Voices National Poetry Contest, and finalist in the 2020 Col. Darron L. Wright Memorial Writing Awards.