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Brian Turner
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Brian Turner is the author of Here, Bullet (Alice James Books, 2005; Bloodaxe Books, 2007). He has recently completed a second collection Talk the Guns, which will be available from Alice James Books in early 2010. He has received an NEA Fellowship in Poetry and a Fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. He currently lives in California and is working on his third collection of poetry.
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Home-made Napalm
—Winter, 1978
We followed a recipe from The Poor Man's
James Bond—my father mixing gasoline
with bone meal and Ivory soap, teaching me
to shave a bar of soap with the flattened edge
of the blade, my hands stung pink
in the morning's damp chill.
He drank coffee
and said nothing of my grandfather,
the Marine, Guadalcanal, the flamethrower
carried on his back. He didn't need to.
There was a thick fog on that morning
he pulled the igniter and the gel
burst into a flame sucking oxygen
from the air, a strange kind of fire
turning inward on itself.
That was thirty years ago.
My grandfather took shots of Kentucky bourbon.
My father downed a twelve-pack each night.
And it was hard to understand why
I'd find him in the living room sometimes,
late, long after I'd gone to bed, waking
to the sound of Josh White singing the blues
in the old-time vinyl, but I began to learn—
to be a man is to carry things inside
no one would ever understand,
things better left unsaid, sung about,
maybe, those rare nights in winter, alone,
the world fuming with alcohol,
spinning in the blue dark.
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| © 2009 The Cortland Review |
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