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David P. Miller’s chapbook, The Afterimages, was published in 2014 by Červená Barva Press. His poems have appeared in Meat for Tea, Main Street Rag, Ibbetson Street, Painters and Poets, Fox Chase Review, Third Wednesday, Wilderness House Literary Review, Muddy River Poetry Review, Oddball Magazine, Incessant Pipe, Clementine Unbound, and Ekphrastic Review, among others. Anthology appearances include Tell-Tale Inklings #1 and three Bagel Bards Anthologies. His poem Kneeling Woman and Dog was included in the 2015 edition of Best Indie Lit New England. David was a member of the multidisciplinary Mobius Artists Group of Boston for 25 years, and is a librarian at Curry College in Milton, Mass.

In the Breath of Two Days

David P. Miller

May first. The President spurned a small-fry helicopter.

Seized the S-3 Viking jet controls, hottie flyboy

as a lady neocon wowed him, for the last little bit

of a shrieking brief journey from shore.

Burst out like a best-friend-forever

all over Abraham Lincoln, aircraft carrier.

Blazoned by mouth and banner that it was nailed.

Mission accomplished, two thousand three.

America’s buttons were said to be bursting.

May third. The granite Old Man broke down overnight,

alone in the final torrent his joints could absorb.

Nobody saw how his chin fractured,

how his lower jaw flew, upper jaw

crumbled, nose and eyebrow decayed

like disease. His forehead expelled

with a split to the skull. All fallen in scraps

to the talus slope. Turnbuckled hooks

grappled the sky where his scalp had been.

You could number each corpse spawned

from the scat of the mission fulfilled,

pick over the Old Man’s rubble. Pull out

fragments enough. Two hundred fifty thousand

body count stones. Then take a breath. Resume.

Repeople the cities with shards of lost face.

— David P. Miller

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