The Advance

Out the barred window sandbags

in a sagging wall surround the guard post

where a soldier half-hidden by the flag

holds his rifle on his knees and looks a little lost.

It’s Sunday and quiet, the traffic noise

off aways, the sea behind the post flat as the tarps

pulled tight over the troop trucks.

Somewhere down the hall soldiers are being boys,

telling some joke in Arabic

in which I’m pretty sure I hear the word “zubrak”:

I walk between shelves loaded with canned rations,

the cool expiring slowly in the high-ceilinged room

while a pinned-up PSYOPS leaflet declares,

If you sleep in a cemetery, you’re bound to have nightmares.

No one sees the doll’s decapitated head small

and neat in rubble. Never tired or sleepy,

the head is its own country

obstinately surviving, the pupil

of   its one eye peering through the glass’s pure

transparency. And a few feet away lie its slim, plastic,

long-legged thighs almost like

an obscenity the eye watches over —

no one in the street, nothing but bolt-marks

from tank-treads scarring the concrete

to give any of   it drama — and what

about the way the lips’ frozen smirk

keeps daring me to touch the sexless V

between the thighs staring up at me?

The barracks dissolve into a reef   of   rubble in the fog.

On either side of the road, crater after crater

flashes with glints of glass, plastic bags,

a chair leg clinging to a dismembered chair.

The TV station, the power stacks

thrusting up through mist, the black-bearded posters

and banners strung across

the streets lead to an absolute nowhere:

all that’s left in the emptied town

after the army pulled out are PSYOPS leaflets

fluttering up around the car that winds

down the coast road deeper into mist, headlights

probing like instruments in a wound

they illuminate the more they violate.