UFR Weekly Newsletter #6: Coming Home
David Cotrone
We’ve completed our facelift. Thank you for your feedback, comments and continued support. We’re now looking for chapbook and book reviews, too. Nothing too formal if you don’t want it to be. We just want to hear about what you’re reading and why you can’t put it down. James Robison does a good job of that, here.
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This past week, I talked to a man who’s just come home from Iraq. “The hardest thing about war isn’t being away,” he said. “I can deal with that. I have a job to do.”
Meanwhile, at home, his children had celebrated their birthdays, his son had had a bad day at school, his daughter fallen off her bike. Without a father to turn to, though, they turned to their mother for comfort, for discipline and advice. So now, Greg’s children aren’t used to his presence; they barely recognized him upon his return, didn’t know how he fit into their lives. He didn’t know how to hold his kids, either. He didn’t know what to tell them, what to think. For the children, it’s as if they are sometimes fatherless, sometimes walking with a ghost. For Greg, his life is always in midair.
“Yeah, the hardest part is coming back.”
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My Brother the Communist by Aaron Wolfe
Four poems by Corey Mesler
Katy Gunn by Brandi Wells
Emma Straub talks with furniture, saying, “Well, I think there is humor in everything. My husband makes me laugh, my parents make me laugh, my friends make me laugh. Humor has always been my coping mechanism, both on and off the page. All comedians are deeply miserable people. That’s what makes them funny. If someone was happy all the time, how funny could they be?”
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There’s more. Greg admits to suffering from PTSD, to borderline depression, to feeling the terror of utter boredom, of total helplessness. Compared to constantly having his senses on edge overseas, at home, everything becomes mundane and dull. What is there to do besides sit in front of the television set and eat, put on weight, think about the friends he left over there? There’s nothing. He watches CNN, tries to stay up on the news. Before, he was the news, he knew things that couldn’t be told on the screen or shared over the airwaves. Now, he knows nothing, only what passes by so briefly on the box.
And then there’s the pain, the doctors that don’t know how to treat it. When Greg sees his physician, he’s prescribed aspirin until he explains that he gets headaches because of bombs that went off below his feet. If he goes back his wife will divorce him. “She will,” he says. “She’ll fucking divorce me.” He’s told there’s no medication for that. He’s going back in January 2012.
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Please, keep submitting. Even if we’ve passed on your work once, we really do want to see more.
Be well,
David