Emily Arnold-Fernández
War and the Children
That night we cooked over
tame flames. Cajoled the children
to eat their carrots, caught 
each other's eye: You never
ate them either, at that age.
Later, turning down the bedclothes,
I found a live mortar, fierce-fragile
as new motherhood. Praying
for steady hands, I carried it
outside the tent, breathing slowly,
placing it carefully a safe
distance away. Knowing
like a hole in the gut: In this war,
there will be no coming to terms.
This is how it starts: On a night
that was ordinary, before
ordinary died forever.
Present Impossible
All summer we were underwater.
Like bogs not yet drained for fields, we squelched
beneath the feet of cattle escaped from their confines,
breathed out noxious-smelling farts, restored the lungs
of a multiplicity too large to comprehend.
We mourn otherwise.
Sudden is not the word for geologic shift
but still we feel suddenly, we humans who were born
to breathe emotion over air, to build hope from fumes.
I go into the water to be reborn.
I go into the water to die,
I am in the water before I can choose,
because of choices my ancestors made. I have to claim them,
those who drained the fields and those who left the bogs,
who went into the water as I do, who now never will emerge.
​​​​​​BIO
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Emily Arnold-Fernández is a poet, scholar, and human rights advocate. Her poems have been published in Cordite, BFS Horizons, Stick Figure Poetry and the Poetry Super Highway. She tends to live on islands.