Anniversary.

Ritterbusch, Dale E.

 Anniversary
 On their anniversary he calls her
 during a mortar attack, hunkers down,
 tells her he loves her, small arms
 clattering in the background, an RPG
 whooshing above his head. She tells him
 what she'll do when he returns;
 he drinks rum straight from the bottle,
 toasts their year together, imagines
 what it will be like back in her arms,
 everything always so alive. His cell phone chirps,
 warns him his battery is dying.
 He signs off, her arms his only objective:
 another round plunks short of his position,
 thunks in a shower of Babylonian sand.
 Tour over, extended twice, he returns to find
 she's been unfaithful, but he can't let go.
 He searches her bedroom, her computer,
 the same way he searched the houses
 of insurgents, looking for weapons,
 women cowering in a corner, a sullen look in the eyes
 of the men. What he finds determines who lives,
 who dies. Search over, he walks out of his house
 past the GM plant shut down for good,
 past a block of houses, every other one foreclosed,
 just another long patrol.
 He buttons his field jacket against the cold,
 considers it simply another exercise
 in escape and evasion; he knows he has to learn
 a whole new set of skills,
 new weapons, again, simply to survive 

A contributing editor to WLA, DALE RITTERBUSCH is the author of two collections of poetry, Lessons Learned and Far From the Temple of Heaven.