day FOURTEEN HUNDRED and THIRTY TWO

"if I die, let it be known that the Army and I died because of this son-of-a-bitch."

-General Mikolai Boltuc speaking about Commanding General Wladyslaw Bortnowski Battle of Tuchola Forest 1939

Belligerents

For four days in September
Bortnowski refused to believe in the existence of tanks.

Woods
death
and a refusal to retreat

this was reasonable.
Inside everything is recorded. In
life every conversation is

a conversation with yourself.
This afternoon
at work through a line of pine trees

to the east of my cubicle
out the window I heard
an ice cream truck selling my favorite

bright orange push-ups.
Yesterday
they had us wait

in the stairwell as a tornado
touched the tops of DFW’s tallest towers
this was reasonable.

Later a fifty-two year old co-worker
running back from lunch break
afraid

to be a minute late fell
and broke her shoulder
then was made

to wait four hours
crying in a seat outside the human
resources and attendance office

for permission to seek medical treatment
and not be terminated
for insubordination.

Belligerent
belligerents
belligerence

in a call-center this is reasonable.
An orange sherbet sun
setting through the clouds

shines off a bloody palm-print smeared
on a cracked bit
of parking lot cement.

The trees in a distant
Polish woods reached once
brown bark slathered

and stamped in rust-red whorls
for the far-off fading orange
butter colored light.

--Paul Koniecki