I.
The pneumatic whine summed
to a roar of savior-engines, deafening.
We looked up at the contrails
through the quiet of our cigarette smoke.
Looking down a line of rucksacks,
I held my little book of maps, serial numbers.
All that was to be saved,
a count of days left.
II.
On a later afternoon, you and I
strewn across hotel sheets.
I counted: coins, guidebooks,
and one you saved.
It was time to leave. They huddled on the wing and begged
from the television.
After you left, I counted: your half-eaten bag
of sour patch kids. One leaflet less. The bedside table.
III.
We had said we would go back to Maine,
work it all out.
Pored over our brochures,
hoping for innocence.
Our tongues strained to act the fact of it,
standing next to cold water.
IV.
In the last flicker, my hand
is slower to yours.
Our last bare attempt
over pale sheets and sand.
As if our words meant anything more
than the mouths they were spoken from.
Our pledges to serve.
That deafening roar.
BENJAMIN BELLET is a PhD candidate in clinical psychology at Harvard University. His research focuses on how humans make sense of loss and trauma. At first, he tried to use statistics to resolve these questions, but did not get any satisfactory answers. He started listening to Metallica and writing poetry instead. Prior to graduate school, he served for five years in the U.S. Army. Ben’s work has been featured in the Dudley Review and Liminal Spaces and will be featured in a forthcoming issue of the Colorado Review.
HOWARD SKRILL is an artist and educator living in Brooklyn with his wife. The monuments he recorded in 2021 have been transformed in recent years by hammers, chisels, markers, spray paint, and plastic wrap, or brought down entirely by lassos and cranes. Works from the series have been exhibited by Terrain and Fairfield and incorporated into his autobiographical essay “Death Wish.”
