The Iowa Review

Brown, D. F.

It Was a Long Time before the Bones Spoke

Peters, John Durham

Media in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Trilogy

Barnhart, Graham

the iowa review 25
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A row of steel frames with counter
weight chains raise target silhouettes 
above a concrete bunker.
Rifles whip crack and echo—
What else can a rifle do, 
but crack? Pop, chatter, bang, clap,
just names for the silence following after. 
On lowered targets I mark bullet holes 
with cardboard discs like shocked into singing mouths.  
White circles plug hits on the silhouette, 
black for the misses outside it.  
They seem to whistle— 
Look. Look. They can’t tell
when they’ve hit something.
O what death we will make from you.
When I fire black haloes converge into clustered 
white hearts, and the high whine of ricochet 
rounds seem to split thin leaf stems 
from their branches. They drift, 
and the bullets keep passing through. 
What art will I make from you?


English

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30 graham barnhart
Sewing
such eyes the widows in Corioli wear
—William Shakespeare, Coriolanus
Behind headlights drawing darker 
night against the snow
he regrets saying Kind of like
Afghanistan aloud.
How to explain to his mother
and grandmother in the otherwise 
silent heat of the car that suddenly
it had been spring for days 
he heard the water running out, 
dirty snow returning to mud,
Humvees crawling thick tread 
into the cliff road. Helicopters always
close—far—thrumming
hornets caught in the valley’s 
cupped hands, and Steve Prescott 
swiveling the mounted Ma Deuce
and saying every so often
feels like I cheated on my wife and 
now I gotta give her flowers—  
even though the hit had been another
team, and we were only stacking 
sewing machines outside houses 
with un-glassed windows 
like blank stares accepting   
a world where widows sew 
their children clothes with needles 
the iowa review 31
left behind by the men 
who killed their husbands. 
It’s just—we had to do a lot 
of slow driving at night in the snow.


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It Was a Long Time before the Bones Spoke

Media in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead Trilogy

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Sewing

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Crimes of Paris

On a Morning When Our Weather Is Sixty Degrees Different

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