by John Stone

When JFK ate a bullet
in Dallas, my father
watched the news, conspicuous
in jeans stained green
at the knees,
called in from a football game
to bear witness.
Jackie O looked like an angel,
he said,
as she tried to hold
her husband's brains
Inside his shattered
tea-cup skull.
Today,
my father shakes his head, but
laughs later,
showing me pictures in his scrapbook,
of Vietnamese nightclub singers.
They're all dressed like Elvis,
short and Asian, and
the strippers in the bars of Saigon,
their eyes are always
dull, like dogs
under the sun,
and here he is on a Hum-Vee
shirtless, smiling,
holding a rifle.

II

When the Challenger exploded,
falling like a comet in a
column of flame over the Atlantic,
I was more concerned with
the book fair at my school, and
my first kiss came hot
and quick
with the destruction of the Berlin Wall.
We had watched
it in our classroom,
excited but unsure why, and later
she pulled me close to her.
We were hidden
away from everyone,
and before our lips met I
could smell her chapstick,
could feel the dampness of sweat
on her lower back as she shook
in my hands.

III

On the streets of Mexico, my sister
Videotaped the children dancing in the mouths
Of the alleyways.
They're dressed in piecemeal clown suits, faces painted
With discarded makeup.
"Oh, how wonderful," she said, clapping,
And she threw them her pocket change,
Never knowing that they will use it to buy glue to sniff.
It dulls the pains of hunger, or so they say.

IV

In 1991, my mother called me
from her hospital bed, and together
we watched the night vision on the news,
the emerald shadows of Baghdad
exploding, exploding
into the surrounding black,
and the war correspondent
cocked his head to the side,
touched one finger
to his ear,
and said,
"Are We Live?"
"We Are Live!"
in a voice so full of disbelief
that I could not comprehend
the scope of it.

V

That night, I rode my bike to the store up the block,
and the man who peeled himself from the shadows outside
was holding a shotgun as black as eternity, and I
froze.
"Mister, what are you doing?"
"Nothing, now get the fuck outta here."
And I did, dropping my paper bags full of candy, my
Stolen cigarettes forgotten,
and I peddled fast, my palms and fingers so sweaty, unsteady,
they keep slipping off the grips of my handlebars.

VI

When the bombs began again,
in 2003,
I was in jail, watching missiles soar
like warbirds on the TV perched above
the Magistrate's empty desk.
I asked to smoke, and was refused.
I reclined on
the cold steel of my bunk,
tracing the graffiti
on the gray concrete walls
with my ringfinger in the dark.
I rolled over,
my back to the bars,
but sleep didn't come,
only the shaky voice
of another anchorman,
pleading,
"Are We Live?"
"We Are Live!"
as if to question
whether God himself
even really had an answer.