Infantry Assault

By Doug Anderson, 2015

The way he made that corpse dance

by emptying one magazine after another into it

and the way the corpse’s face began to peel off

like a mask because the skull had been shattered, brains

spilled out, but he couldn’t stop killing that corpse, 5

wanted to make damn sure; I thought maybe

he was killing all the ones he’d missed; and

the way they dragged that guy out of the stream,

cut him to pieces, the stream running red

with all the bodies in it, and the way the captain 10

didn’t try to stop them, his silence saying, No Prisoners, and

the way when all the Cong were dead, lined up in rows,

thirty-nine in all, our boys went to work on all the pigs

and chickens in the village until

there was no place that was not red, and 15

finally, how the thatch was lit, the village burned

and how afterwards we were quiet riding back

on the tracks, watching the ancestral serpent rise

over the village in black coils, and

how our bones knew what we’d done. 20