by Gale Marie Thompson
“—the dead bodies stacked up like cordwood—”
—Ken Burns, The War
Can you see enough to bury
what look like stacks of cordwood
who they put into the hefty ground
I put these things away say please, just let me watch my movie
say oh, let’s continue with this scene
as they drag something I can’t see clean away
I can’t seem to find a look that is reciprocal
men who push their crying into the camera
(“We never say, a rigid stone or rigid iron, nor do we say, rigid ice; but we say,
an animal body or limb, when cold, is rigid. Rigid is then opposed to flexible,
but expresses less than inflexible.”)
This much has been given to me
this keeping of company a wintering
so deep in the ground
how and when we become models
for monuments in the eternal struggle
against matter
I want to resist this my own completed form
Every sign I read clearest and begin again
if I don’t
A chill rushes through my teeth and the pain
comes unanswered, answering
loop of disquiet of
bodies tossed plaque
on the tv screen
something slighter
than memory
so quickly the turnaround
Cans lined up on the screen
to what end
looking at
what signal
Gale Marie Thompson is the author of Soldier On (Tupelo Press, 2015) and Helen or My Hunger (YesYes Books, 2020). She has received fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center and Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts. Her work appears in American Poetry Review, Tin House Online, Gulf Coast, Guernica, and Bennington Review, among others. She is the founding editor of Jellyfish Magazine, and she lives, writes, and teaches in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can find her on Twitter as @thegalester.