Silver Lake
Near the high-end furnishings store
next to the building where the ethnic market
stood before the robbery thirty-five years ago
and a brutal event changed the lives
of the older Asian couple who sold
the store and moved to the San Juan Islands,
there’s a coffee shop with six dollar cups
of coffee, breakfast plates for fifteen dollars
and a gathering of hipsters chatting, iPhones
in hand or nearby, sharing modern life
on a sunny day in LA. I'm seated at a small table
on the sidewalk with my wife, my good friend
and for an instant, maybe longer, I’m back
in the small white clapboard house with the lemon
tree, lime tree on Duane Street down the hill
from Apex where life had an easy, predictable flow,
every day filled with possibilities of the best kind
until a nine-year-old came into that store; her brain
splattered against the storefront glass
clicked the switch to a time of locked windows
and doors, distrust like an avenging angel
seething into our lives.
Bones
When the excavator lumbers into a field outside Vimy,
a bucket drops, teeth dig in, earth ripped
in giant swaths end to end. In the cavernous depth—
human remains: intact humerus, femur, tibia, left foot
in a well-worn leather boot, scapula,
and a skull—gaping hole in back, missing jaw in front.
Police are called, forensics, search for foul play. History
uncovered—bones of a World War One
soldier, one of 11000 Canadian casualties in this once
fortified place, many still missing in action today. Records
are kept. After months of analysis, tracking
down relatives to test for DNA— a Scot from Ontario,
joined Winnipeg's 8th in 1914. Thirty years old slowed
with a debilitating shoulder injury
an anthropologist says, pain he must have endured thru
the hard winter of 1917 into spring, Battle of Vimy Ridge,
ending with a bullet to his brain.
The war to end all wars…
Marc Swan is a retired vocational rehabilitation counselor. His poems have recently been published or forthcoming in Scrivener Creative Review, Sanskrit, The Antigonish Review, Mudfish, Gargoyle, Midwest Quarterly, Nuclear Impact Anthology, among others. His third collection, Simple Distraction, was published by Tall-Lighthouse, London, England. He lives with his wife Dd in Portland Maine.