[Author’s Note: This poem also appears in my play, The Weeping Water Cafe.]

A face, tender as a porcelain doll,
cracks under the white hot mirror of
quartz lights.
A voice,
feeble at first,
then shouts into my living room.

I stop,
listen,
and a wrinkled pea rolls off my fork.

Something about exploding fuel like erasers
and a lost cause
and bruised bodies
and They’re All Dead.
I can’t swallow my mashed potatoes.

A commercial.

They are called heroes.
Invisible chests are adorned
with the metals from exploded tanks
and their memories are bathed in the
salty tear from a child’s eye.

The apple cobbler doesn’t look so good any more.

The news comes in fast…
A blue sock hiding a charred bone washes ashore —
a bottle holding a plea for help
from another unknown brother in horror.
They didn’t know what hit ’em.

The paste, called gravy, hardens over my
television dinner,
mostly white meat.

Replayed before the bloodshot eye of ground pirates,
the white pencils explode carefully planned
speeches again
and then some more.

And so the heroes are back in the clouds
where they belong.

And the potatoes,
quiet,
and still unswallowed,
harden
into seven chalky headstones.