Read Poem: A String of Landays, by Paul Brooke

—Landays are Afghani poems told in two lines.

Dozers crushed roots of the old burr oak.
The tree of hope painstakingly died in four years.

After Iraq and Afghanistan,
no one knew he killed 14,000 with drone strikes.

A beautiful house slept under shade
but grew hotter and more ill-tempered each summer.

She loved her from afar for decades.
Watching the comet in gloom, she reached for her hand.

The red-winged blackbird’s epaulettes shone
in pulses of sunlight above the green cattails.

This old man lied repeatedly to us,
compacting our dark soil but we emerged unscathed.

His wife refused to sleep with him.
She said his penis was like a tiny toadstool.

We buried our guns in the backyard.
Rattled our keyboards till we solved that injustice.

Upon driving home in rain and fog,
the cornfields surprised us with their uniformity.

A police dog sniffed kilos of pot.
The man wondered when they’d find the loaded pistols.

A white man—with a racist dad—wed
a black woman, photographed only in grayscale.

After seventeen years of marriage,
she never reached a single orgasm, ever.

Between ship and whale, the young man steered
his boat. A harpoon punctured him through his torso.

Our daughter stole money from others.
All her unpaid bills were thrown in the back of her closet.

A fawn was born in her wild backyard.
The abused girl watched, never telling anyone.

His wife, repulsed by each touch,
believed her husband’s head was a sweaty pumpkin.

A pack of wolves passed him on the trail;
the man longed to stroke their black fur endlessly.

Her brood visited the nursing home,
behind glass, worried their touch would kill her.

We stumbled upon a silverback
snared by poachers’ wire, deep in Uganda, dead.

With windows open, the cicadas’
nightly chorus was rowdy but strangely soothing.

For years, his wife described holding up a frog
as resembling his backside. Frog ass she said.

Residual sadness consumed
the parents: never found one trace of their young son.

In wet markets in Thailand, we strode—
among strung snakes and hung dogs—unable to speak.

They unrolled the felt yurt, tending lambs
and hammering horseshoes, felt at peace in Delger.

Missing Lima and his father’s fare,
he made ceviche and picaronis with honey.

His wife knew her husband was a moron
when he said Easter Seals lived on Easter Island.

After four tours and a blasted convoy,
his brother shrank angrily from his family.

The girl, despite turning 18, sought
to end tyranny and registered to vote.

As a child, she peered over haybales
as two barn owls fed field mice to their eager young.

The soldier wept online during wife’s
delivery. Distance is deliberate torture.

Her husband said his favorite book
was by Alexander Dumb-Ass. No one told him.

She lived altogether on a diet
of conspiracies and died forlorn, unloved.

Dolphins herded to a Faroe beach
are slaughtered by spinal lances in a blood sea.

For beadwork, the Lakóta woman
made a mistake because only God is perfect.

Both daughters shunned him when he remarried
too quickly after his wife’s death and “her replacement.”

His first wife laughed at his elevated
sense of self, hubris. “You’ve gone bankrupt seven times.”

As she starved, she relished the half-digested
spruce tips from the hare’s stomach, fragrant and floral.

The hummingbird bathed in straight down rain:
his red shield gleaming, his beak jousting the droplets.