Kevin Bowen

Playing Basketball with the Viet Cong
For Nguyen Quang Sang

You never thought it would come to this,
that afternoon in the war
when you leaned so hard into the controls
you became part of the landscape:
just you, the old man, old woman,
and their buffalo.
You never thought then
that this gray-haired man in sandals
smoking Gauloises on your back porch,
drinking your beer, his rough cough
punctuating tales of how he fooled
the French in '54,
would arrive at your back door
to call you out to shoot baskets, friend.
If at first he seems awkward,
before long he's got it down.
His left leg lifts from the ground,
his arms arch back then forward
from the waist to release the ball
arcing to the hoop, one, two,…
ten straight times. You stare at him
in his T-shirt, sandals, and shorts.
Yes, he smiles. It's a gift,
good for bringing gunships down
as he did in the Delta
and in the other places where he whispers,
there may be other scores to settle.

Incoming

Don't let them kid you -
The mind no fool like the movies,
doesn't wait for the flash or screech,
but moves of its own accord,
even hears the slight
bump the mortars make
as they kiss the tubes good-bye.
Then the furious rain,
a fist driving home a message:
"Boy, you don't belong here."
On good nights they walk them in.
You wait for them to fall,
stomach pinned so tight to the ground
you might feel a woman's foot
pace a kitchen floor in Brownsville;
the hushed fall of a man lost
in a corn field in Michigan;
a young girl's finger trace
a lover's name on a beach along Cape Cod.
But then the air is sucked
straight up off the jungle
floor and the entire weight
of Jupiter and her moons
presses down on the back of a knee.
In a moment, it's over.
But it takes a lifetime to recover,
let out the last breath
you took as you dove.
This is why you'll see them sometimes,
in malls, men and women off in corners:
the ways they stare through the windows in silence.