The New Joan of Arc
                            Kyle Hemmings

 

 

 

Between crooked assaults     a woman gave me shelter,
one with large holocaust eyes entrenched in her face.
It meant I could read her convex half-blind histories, each time
with a different meaning &     I could come away, changed,
re-routed. At night, when the rockets sheared the sky,
we slept over or underneath the other, surrogates
of love and emptiness    our bodies flaking at the edges
as if false reports of the front.
The sliced moon hung over our room    quiet as a mercy killing.

After our squad leader ordered us to pull out,
the woman who gave me shelter announced
she would lead the charge    She said she always
wanted to catch bullets in straight lines
melt them in the concentric circles     of her being
that she wanted to be remembered     as a solar flare.