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STEVE GEHRKE
From The Machine Gunner’s Letters
(as
Otto Dix)
How, you write, will I survive? With instinct, trigger-eye,
the
soldiers like turtles flipped over in the mud, limb-flail and broken
shell. These thoughts move through me as I write, a telegraph tape
slipping
through fingers. The lumberjack, they call me,
timber in the field, green blemished by red-splatter, like leaves at fall’s
beginning. Behind
the gun, I am eternity, I am time looking out
from
the inside of a clock, the click-stop finger that marks
the finish line. My body, knuckle-ache and recoil, records each loss,
tally-marks on the
black slate of the heart. I am the vomit-taste in the mouth,
what
they know is watching, though they race towards me as I
hand death out, a parade-master tossing candy to the crowd. Later, under star-
flutter,
the night opening parachutes as it falls, I have to pick, like needles
from a pin-cushion, the splintered death out of me. How once, I made
your
body gleam, the tongued lips, boot-polish on the nipples,
your
skin rubbed with orange peels. I could have, then, painted
beautifully. Now, even the most gentle touch dissolves, my finger harp-strumming
the trigger, grenade pin held between the teeth.
Love, all night the gun,
cartridge oil, rivet,
barrel clip, puts itself together in my mind.
It’s
so quiet out there, I can almost hear the maggots trash-
picking the fields, or the final woman-call a body makes. Someone should rat-
skitter
through the foxholes, the moonstricken thistle-bush,
and
close their awful, glowing mouths. Someone should, mercy-
handed, swift, sew this trench-line closed. Tomorrow, more men will ladder
the
trench wall, mud-faced, horrible, caravan towards me in the dawn.
How will I survive? I will kill one man over and over until I’ve killed
them all. 
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