Paul David Adkins

KATHLEEN GRABER'S CORRESPONDENCE GIVES ME A PAPER CUT AFTER A HARD DAY IN IRAQ

Blood for oil, I muse
as the tiny rivulet creasing the print of my thumb
fills like a stream in the spring
to overflowing.

I get
this is no injury,
no Purple Heart forthcoming,
no lauding from the colonel
as the medal's honed pin passes
a half-inch from my skin.

We were talking
about distance, how unimaginably far
between the stars, even planets.
Who could bridge them?
Who could dip their oars and row
a million, billion years?

And now this stupid cut
distracts us from "The Letters,"
"The Language of Bees."
A slender stain soaks the edge
of "Terra Incognita."

Does it sting?

You bet your ass.

We're tight like that.

She knows that men are dying.
My cut merits
not even half a caesura
in the war's least readable history.

It doesn't stop her—
Blood for oil, she laughs.

An oil that fouls and cakes
within a minute in the air.

No wonder, she notes,
war's cylinders need
so often to be lathed and bored.

Paul David Adkins grew up in South Florida and lives in New York.