This time we introduce the following poems by Caroline LeBlanc as the poet in the Editor’s choice. Her poems on women in times of war have an especial insight. It is very original; she also tries to depict freedom as differing from individual to individual. She depicts a new kind of aesthetics through her well-knit poems. Caroline LeBlanc's writing focuses on women's and relationship issues, the war( her husband and one of her sons have both been deployed to the Middle East), the body, mythology, dreams, nature and the discoveries she is making about the post-colonial experiences of her working class, French Canadian and Acadian ancestors.

Between Worlds

Through rotted teeth, my captors spit tobacco juice
At my feet as they rattled their ammo belts
And cupped their business packed in denim skin.

Shirts and pants salted with sweat, they threatened
Things men with Crest smiles would never speak.
I wake, relieved to be rescued, shiver off the smell

Of feral men, virility twisted into cruelty. I brush
My teeth then pad out to the roadside canister
For the daily paper. Stories of Darfur, Palestine, Miramar

Are buried beneath headlines about bank failures, gas prices
And monster storms. Waning hints of honeysuckle mingle
With the smell of ink smoking off the paper in my hand.

The Women’s Vote

Grand’Mere was the last of nine who got
Her spot on the line—the sorting bin to be precise.
By Mama’s first birthday, women, nailed down the vote
Despite serving time for their daring. When she was
Old enough to join the factory crew, the French priest’s opinion
Guided the Catholic choice—“on pain of excommunication.”

When I knew her, Mama based her views
On personal dislikes—things about a wife, the tenor
Of a voice, the tilt of the mask. Hers was not
A matriarchy of issue-based polls or party platforms.
The Church no longer had a claim on her divorced ballot.
She pronounced her judgments with a certain malice.

Like her, each election I’ve not told who I’d choose,
Though all knew I favored civil, women’s rights,
Even peace, and had friends with leftish views.
My silence kept things calm (never to Mama’s taste),
Cooled my Yankee father-in-law’s Republican ardor
For wanton political quarrels he’d bait with delight.

Six years of needless war has loosed my tongue.
Phoenix-like my passions erupt and –Voila!—
Not unlike my Mama, I choose with my gut.

Orders

My fingers travel the knoll of his shoulder,
mind flashing to the day his orders arrived,
before the cold and early snow drifts on the garden.

Nine months “boots on hostile ground” the official
words read in translation, but in this moment
his callused foot, bare and chill, strokes my calf.

We have already covered each other’s backs,
dry from indoor heat, with creamed coconut oil—
white and warmed between our palms –

so as not to assault our tender flesh. It will be my job
to rake snow from the roof, blow it from our drive,
look after family members and matters

while rough desert sands find their way
into his socks, his eyes and nose and mouth,
his ears and hair, and his boots make prints

barren land will forget in less time than we have
to memorize our familiar geographies
before he must answer this call to duty.

Last Supper

What little time we have left,
Before you report, we divide.
By the door, we pile your combat gear
Before we sit to eat our cold crab.

Without delay, we grip the long legs
Tight despite their sharp spines,
Tear sections apart at the joints.
You scissor the pale inside of limbs.

Soft undersides open and we strip
Meat in long lengths. Cavernous
Shoulders release plump
White bundles. Our tangled fingers

Dig into mounds of buttered
Morsels and hurry drips sweet
On our lips, hungry for one more
Repast before parting.

No Comfort

God was no comfort the night
blue light marked time above us
and deepened the crevices
of your craggy profile.
Step by sinister step,
it marched us toward the rotating doors
that devoured your shadow,
spit you into your sky god’s
Florescent terminal
and war.

Digital Camouflage

Today the airport swarms with men in digital camouflage, beige
Moss and olive green cubits in find-the-shape patterns for our citizen army.
Haircuts have not changed and, though indoors no one wears headgear,
It’s now Kevlar helmets in combat. Only Velcro patches are permanently
Stitched on shirts made of pockets. Insignia is all quick change.

Rank no longer sits on collars or sleeves but in the bulls-eye of the sternum
Where it is harder to find. Pants too are pockets inside pockets, everything
Wash and wear. Privates, not all young and acne faced, are just as likely to have
Gray hairs, even mimic colonels from a distance. Soldiers sport middle-aged
Paunches as standards of all kinds slide in our oily hunger for warriors.

My own husband sojourns in the flat, monotonous sand, walks a mile,
Each way, to his clinic in full body armor and helmet, side arm holstered to his thigh.
My son, on the other hand, has helmet-mounted night-vision goggles,
A customized automatic weapon and rapid-release body armor so he can fast forward
if his unit is pinned down and they become the hunted rather than the hunters.

Time Has Stopped

for six I knew,
fallen
in so few months,
days are dark,
simple demands tire,
nights light up with worry
or random lines
from the other side of time.

I stew about thresholds,
mine and others,
think of people I hated,
loved, just took for granted,
how much and when.
Things, like success,
have lost their allure.

Mostly, I wonder,
does everlasting have
an after—a before?

Cries in the Night

It’s another night of not sleeping after not sleeping
the night before. I wander back to the guest room
that once belonged to my son deployed East.
Truthfully, the disturbed order of things
upsets me more than my wakefulness.
The air stifles, even with the window open
and then, in the heavy silence, a burro brays.

The ass’s cry startles me as always, echo that it is
of a dumb beast’s agony. It flutters and festers
and sets me wondering if, in the hot night,
he’s been bitten by one too many deer flies.
But he does this all winter too, when flies are eggs
asleep in dung and barn cracks filled with mud—
like the mud bricks and mortar of Afghani walls.

On the other side of the world, it is light and donkeys,
belly’s churning, are harnessed for the day’s labor.

Intimate Strangers

After war, your touch is foreign,
an invasion of my armored flesh,
barricaded against your death
on a road with IEDs or worse,
your injury with invisible wounds.

Your fingertips trigger concussive
tremors in my taut muscles,
implosions of fear won’t subside,
rage dwells beside relief,
beside joy over your return.

The world is full of treachery and my body
suffers as treason what your mind
exalts —duty, honor, patriotism,
a warrior’s passion that in the end
calls more than your love for me.

My ability to stay present in this is
tentative at best. Each breath reminds me
to be gentle. We can only mend
this tear if we risk being new again
even after forty years of knowing.