English Studies Forum

Cowboy

Maggie Jaffe

phones minutes after I spill

scalding tea on my arm.  Feels

icy-cold at first, then bubbles white-hot

and red.  He says, It'll hurt

like hell for days but won't scar you.

He was right, but the pain, shit,

the pain, only Percodan quiets

the torn and suppurating flesh.

I suppress an urge to ask him

if he's ever seen anyone napalmed—

jellied petroleum cooked to 18-hundred

degrees—but I already know: he walked point

for Doc who was wasted when a mortar found him. 

Cowboy doesn't talk much about his wound,

how years later his legs still ache,

especially in Wyoming winters. 

Out of the blue I say, in Kafka's "Penal Colony"

the imagined crime is indelibly scratched

onto the penitent's back: Vietnam's like that.

No, Cowboy says, that's just a metaphor.

Vietnam was worse.