"The New War" in current issue of "War, Literature and the Arts"

Here's the new issue of War, Literature and the Arts including one of my poems. I'm really enjoying it, especially the nonfiction. The journal is published by the U.S. Air Force Academy, interestingly.

http://wlajournal.com/24_1/24__index.html

My poem in this issue, called "The New War," was written as an epilogue to my poem sequence "Persephone Post-War." It's reprinted below. Go to the magazine for the evocative work filling the rest of the magazine, many of it by soldiers and veterans. 

L i s a  B e r n s t e i n  (L i s a  B)

The New War

The new war has started.

Photos of caskets

disappear the next day from the newspapers.

The new wounded come home

with nano-reels of film curled

in their cells, inscriptions

for their children,

genetic messages for the living world.

The civilians recall their airtight homes

as one frame appears on the news

and another:

the man with the hood over his head

and wires strung from his extended arms,

the man crouched naked before the dogs…

The new war has started.

The new wounded come home

with hidden inscriptions for their children…

Do you hear the singing far below us, the stirring

in the soft dirt?

I won’t walk again on that darkening ground.

I can still taste the rotten fruit

where the dead keep turning

and the sweet honey I found near it.

Let the fruit fall here in the open light

where we can see it and eat it.

But the veterans will go down again, Persephones,

every winter,

and if they’re lucky, only then.

The new war goes on.

The soldiers send messages, digital snapshots

like bright, strange apples fallen to earth—

the red blood, the randomly arranged bodies.

Sickening fruit—may it fall

into the light

and be seen by the world.

copyright © 2013 Lisa Bernstein