24 mai 1968

M.M. Adjarian

Not quite a coat hanger, the boy stands skinny tall

in Boy Scout khakis and Converse tennis shoes, 

hands behind his back, knee bones grinning above his 

socks. He leads a band of yucca plants, suburban soldiers, 

spears spine-straight and sharp as quills. My brother is posing, 

legs apart, halting his front lawn march only for the uncle 

visiting from France who captured him on film, then wrote

 the date and my brother’s age in blue curves like tattoos 

on the shoulder back of the photo: 24 mai 1968, 14 ans.

Too young for Vietnam, the war our uncle’s country left 

undone, my brother looks more warrior than boy, 

unaware that the forearms linked by hands clasped at the 

small of his back opens his chest as much to attack as to love.  

Just out of diapers and bunkered down with my mother perhaps, 

I do not remember this day. Looking now at this sharp-edged 

boy, I could almost take a ruler, align it to the lengths his 

body traces and calculate the area of the isosceles triangle 

he makes in space; but the reality of this boy, subtler than 

geometry, has roots deeper than the grass where he stands. 

The arms he hides are new-sprouted with feathers; in a year, 

he will swear an oath and Eagle then take running steps 

like Wilbur and Orville Wright into a waiting sky. 

In four years and a scout no longer, he will use his wings 

to bear him away from the shadows at his feet trailing east 

toward our house, the house divided into angry factions, 

unseen but for half of one eave above and beside him. Loyal 

only to the wind, he will fly from the war inside that house, 

a war no more of his making than Vietnam.