Rich's Nam 

When Rich came back from Nam
he and Doug and I spent the nights
shooting craps. Squatting down
and tossing dice against the base
of a bare wall in his apartment.
Over there his construction battalion
had built roads through the jungle.
Beautiful blacktop roads straight
through the jungle, he explained
flatly. The next day our tanks rolled
through and chewed them all up
with their steel plate treads. Then
they built more roads and a few
days later the tanks rolled through
to the same effect. I did not quite
catch the scoring system those
first couple of nights what with
the Budweiser and Jack Daniel’s
and spliffs and all. Doug rolled
and I rolled and then Rich rolled.
Sometimes Rich slapped a couple
of bills on my stack and sometimes                                                                       
he took a couple away. He was that
into it. Could not get enough of it.
Hours on end. It made no difference
who won or lost. Who was ahead.
It was, I guess, just that hard to let go. 


by Contributing Poet  Robert Perchan  Copyright © 2026
VWP 20206    Originally published in Misfit Magazine (No. 32, Spring 2021). 

Bio:  Robert Perchan's latest books are the comic futuristic novella Tropic of Scorpio (Spuyten Duyvil
Press, 2022) and Last Notes from a Split Peninsula: Poems and Prose Poems (UnCollected
Press, 2021).  His poetry collection Fluid in Darkness, Frozen in Light won the 1999 Pearl
Poetry Prize and was published by Pearl Editions in 2000.  Bob continues to eat and drink and
write in Busan, South Korea, under the bemused gaze of his translator wife, Mi-kyung Lee.