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VIETNAM  WAR  POETRY
​
ROBERTA FEINS 

                        ​Body Bags 

                        I fucked the Vietnam War
                        in the wild misery of Alan's eyes. Maybe
                        he was already crazy – at eleven
                        saw his brother's hand torn off by a Harvester.

                        No relief in sex for him,
                        he couldn't come, but planted mines
                        of orgasm in me, watched 'em explode.

                        In his white Corvette, we cruised
                        the two-lanes of Carteret County, North Carolina:
                        an ex-Marine, a Jew from New York,
                        both of us feeding on the strange energy of our differences.

                        He'd grip the wheel and tell me
                        about throwing men out of helicopters,
                        how a crash had left him in constant pain.

                        After Thanksgiving, he disappeared
                        to Nicaragua, where it wasn't over.
                        All the rest of the year, I couldn’t

                        look at shopping bags.
                        They were printed with jungle-green,
                        massacre-red, held shrapnel
                        wrapped in tissue. 

                                                ~


                        "I wrote about the Vietnam War because I was 13 in 1968 and went to rallies and marches against the war.
                        The War was the defining political event of those years."



                        by Contributing Poet  Roberta Feins   Copyright © 2016 
                        ​VWP 2016     First published in  VietnamWarPoetry.com 
                        Bio:  Roberta Feins  received her MFA in poetry in 2007 from New England College.
​​                        Her poems have been published in Five AM, Antioch Review, The Cortland Review 
​​                        and The Gettysburg Review, among others.
​​                        Her chapbook Something Like a River, was published by Moon Path Press in 2013.
​​                        Roberta edits the e-zine  Switched-OnGutenberg.org 
  

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