Poetry

Hell-Hound-Warfare

An Iraq-Afghanistan special report

Roman Newell
The Interstitial
Published in
1 min readOct 4, 2024

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Photo by author.

Knife hands hell-hound my throat, my bloodshot
eye stays
open,

my face painted
desert, two wet trails go
from gray youth to
pink-cheeks-manhood,

singed brows and lashes send
smoke signals to circling ‘copters, hands
covered in blood, one of us
is dead.

Ears droop to
my bent-knee-side, forlornly killed
again, I watch the slow-
moving nexus of pythons-time wrench
and wrap, tighter, with every
sinew-corded-turn,

night-vision-light splits the moment
between John being
alive and John being dead,

time falls through
a hole, his parents fall through a hole, his wife
falls through a hole, his children fall through a
hole in

the road where
the bomb exploded and carved out blacktop like
a scoop of ice cream,

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Roman Newell
The Interstitial

Busy working on my novel, 20XX. I also talk about the writing journey on Substack. romannewell.substack.com.