Brian Turner
Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived abroad in South Korea for a year before serving for seven years in the U.S. Army. He was deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1999-2000 with the 10th Mountain Division. Then in November 2003 he was an infantry team leader for a year in Iraq with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. His first book, Here, Bullet, chronicles his time in Iraq. Turner has been featured on National Public Radio, the Newshour with Jim Lehrer and the BBC. He has received a NEA Literature Fellowship in Poetry, the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship and a fellowship from the Lannan Foundation. Turner has taught English at Fresno City College. Source
How Bright It Is
April. And the air dry
As the shoulders of a water buffalo.
Grasshoppers scratch at the dirt,
rub their wings with thin legs
flaring out in front of the soldiers
in low arcing flights, wings a blur.
The soldiers don’t notice anymore,
seeing only the wreckage of the streets,
bodies draped with sheets, and the sun,
how bright it is, how hard and flat and white.
It will take many nails from the coffinmakers
to shut out this light, which reflects off everything:
the calloused feet of the dead, their bony hands,
their pale foreheads so cold, brilliant in the sun.
Published:
2005
Length:
Regular
Literary Movements:
Contemporary
Anthology Years:
2023
Themes:
Nature
Violence & War
Literary Devices:
Imagery
visually descriptive or figurative language, especially in a literary work
Interrupted Clause
a word group (a statement, question, or exclamation) that interrupts the flow of a sentence and is usually set off by commas, dashes, or parentheses
Simile
a comparison between two unlike things using the words “like” or “as”