On the Move, March 2003

On the Move,

March 2003

by james bezerra

We drove east for days.

It always seemed to be the middle of the night.

I learned my body can’t handle

7-11 coffee

and diet Red Bull

in the same two hundred miles.

We woke in a New Mexico motel

as US armor swooped into Iraqi desert

and we sat there,

dumbfounded,

eating Egg McMuffins watching war,

live,

on TV.

Just like that.

No one had ever quite seen that before:

a TV camera on a tank.

We’re so used to it now:

The Forever War.

Anderson Cooper in a desert,

stylish black flak jacket -

makes one wonder if it’s custom tailored

and where do you find a tailor

who works with Kevlar? -

he looks square-y from a bad uplink;

Looks like he’s on safari.

Pink and yellow Tulsa strip club neon shimmies

like a mirage

of a lighthouse

when we pass on the 44 at night.

That’s all I remember of Oklahoma.

New forms of food we found along the way:

White Castle, Waffle House, Cracker Barrel,

Lambert’s Café home of the Throwed Rolls. Fried Okra,

which I thought were chicken nuggets, but which very much weren’t.

Other things we’d never of heard of then:

IED

and extraordinary rendition,

enhanced interrogation,

sectarian violence,

surge and hold,

and Abu Ghraib,

and Green Zone,

and Blackwater,

and Haliburton,

Oscar Mike and

oh-dark-30

and embrace the suck

and hollow armies

and The 80 Percent Solution.

It was harder to find a drink

in the middle west,

but on the same day

I did see

the world’s largest banjo

and its most giant fiddle.

Yakov Smirnoff had a theater then

in Branson Missouri

and on Sundays

they used it as a church.

How do you even measure a war anyway, -

we asked in Hannibal,

trying to skip stones across the Mississippi -

in tons of ordinance? In time?

In pints of blood

or un-beat heartbeats?

In Illinois

in East St. Louis

a guy told me they dig basements

with dynamite.

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