The Iowa Review

Barnhart, Graham

the iowa review 23graham barnhartMy Pittsburgh For as long as I was gone my Pittsburgh was a summer city of telephone poles tacked all over with beer bottle caps.In the evenings, deer wandered Forbes Avenue on their way to or from the river.  No one was surprised when lovers spent afternoons leaning  naked from bedroom windows calling   Marco—        Polo— On their sills amber glasses of iced tea emptied and filled with sunlight.When I came home there was snow—Beautiful in the way beautiful means absent, hoofprints appeared regularly at the crosswalks,but the deer were no longer seen.Hoping to become vessels for which to pour into need not also mean pouring out, lovers spentthe winter whispering —Marco        —Polo back and forth in the cold parks until, lips pressed to their ears, they heard each other saying only —Marco           —Marco          —Marco

English

My Pittsburgh

Nwachukwu, Iheoma

Train Juju

the iowa review 25Positive FeedbackA row of steel frames with counterweight chains raise target silhouettes above a concrete bunker.Rifles whip crack and echo—What else can a rifle do, but crack? Pop, chatter, bang, clap,just names for the silence following after. On lowered targets I mark bullet holes with cardboard discs like shocked into singing mouths.  White circles plug hits on the silhouette, black for the misses outside it.  They seem to whistle— Look. Look. They can’t tellwhen they’ve hit something.O what death we will make from you.When I fire black haloes converge into clustered white hearts, and the high whine of ricochet rounds seem to split thin leaf stems from their branches. They drift, and the bullets keep passing through. What art will I make from you?

Positive Feedback

Front Matter, The Iowa Review, 47/1 Spring 2017

the iowa review 33Everything in Sunlight I Can’t Stop Seeingafter Bruce WeiglI fry an egg over easy, and eat itbetween two slices of wheat toast.Through the kitchen window I watch a workman prying up the old street.   Brittle sparks jump from the brick top when he strikes it. Or it’s the shovel tip scoured to chromebouncing off the clay.  I leave my sister’s house, and the intersection transformer is still humming somehow. I’m used to the electricity quieting in the wire when the sun scrapes its knee bloody up the porch step.   I walk beneath the orange  fluorescent street lampsand the white fluorescent street lamps turningthe air around themselves resinous with bluing rings like flooded drainage ditch ripples around dropped earrings.  Tree branches, black in the dawn sky, resume their grays and browns by lunch, but the black wrought fences continue leaning into their rust, rigid and failing. —there is no war in this but me.

Everything in Sunlight I Can’t Stop Seeing

26 graham barnhartCultivating MassLet the peaceful young men work their bis and tris.     Let’s not begrudge them their beach muscle. This is not bitterness. Please, let them  never imagine their Clean and Press     is a casualty raised up and over  a Humvee’s up-armor. Let them never know a body  weighs more unconscious    or consider that barbells are built to be lifted, our bodies    to lie down.   Today I can deadlift four-oh-five.When I can move four-ten that will not stop a bullet    or                    the overpressure of a bomb flooding some tightened space, never mind         the shrapnel and heat careening through that rapid bloat ripping—the iowa review 27But if lifting is not a prayer  why do my knees hurt?  Why lunge genuflections in fifty-yard intervals if not to make less fragile these legs    I beg to keep? If the consecration of chalk buckets is not a blessing  then the measured tearing down of my tissue, the shallow scarring of its muscle,  is not teaching this body reverence to whatever  is in it that tells it—cohere.       But I say this is faith, I am learning  to tighten myself together and knowing the little good it will do.Let the peaceful young men believe for awhile longer  anything otherwise. 

Cultivating Mass

24 graham barnhartIndiana-stan  First: HE rounds their kicked-up smoke dust same color as whatever earth they strike. Nothing seen we know them by bellows thumping bare hills beyond the bombed-out tank hulks we were supposed to hit. A thunder you can set your watch to.    Next: illume roundspacked light and smoke and shot too low start fires in the tall grass.  Imagine these man-made stars washing night like photograph half developed.In daylight, just ash dragging fieldsthat aren’t allowed to burn.    Of course: over there if the wheat crops, or the poppy harvest go to roast, we won’t wait for the fires to die out safely.  We can leave as soon we start them. 

Indiana-stan

the iowa review 29The War Makes Everyone LonelyMy sister’s been receiving a lot of calls from strangers. This is how she learns her number is listed on an escort site.  Normally she talks about her fiancé, her dog,what they think I must not want—really, to hear.Now these guys keep calling, asking for Elisha.And I’m sitting there, in Afghanistan, in a little plywood room painted red hung with pictures of the other guys’ wives.I can hear a wind in ribbons through the concertina.and Allen’s boots on the roof as he brushes snow off the dish,and two privates debating the odds of an attack since it’s already two a.m. and cold as shit, and my sister is wondering if maybe she needs a lawyer,and I’m thinking: What about Elisha?  She must be home, I imagine, counting hits against the number of times the phone hasn’t rung. 

The War Makes Everyone Lonely

30 graham barnhartSewingsuch eyes the widows in Corioli wear—William Shakespeare, CoriolanusBehind headlights drawing darker night against the snowhe regrets saying Kind of likeAfghanistan aloud.How to explain to his motherand grandmother in the otherwise silent heat of the car that suddenlyit had been spring for days he heard the water running out, dirty snow returning to mud,Humvees crawling thick tread into the cliff road. Helicopters alwaysclose—far—thrumminghornets caught in the valley’s cupped hands, and Steve Prescott swiveling the mounted Ma Deuceand saying every so oftenfeels like I cheated on my wife and now I gotta give her flowers—  even though the hit had been anotherteam, and we were only stacking sewing machines outside houses with un-glassed windows like blank stares accepting   a world where widows sew their children clothes with needles the iowa review 31left behind by the men who killed their husbands. It’s just—we had to do a lot of slow driving at night in the snow.

Sewing

28 graham barnhartCertificates of TrainingAfter misspellings and formatting errorsonly half the certificates ended upon good card stock, scrawled with vineyardrows of Pashtu: military rank, and namesand fathers’ names.             But after the ceremony,photographs, and handshakes and handsheld to the heart, and blessingsthey only asked if I would pleasemake new diplomas in English.English, they said, is official.The Pashtu lovely, but no one believes it.

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