Soldier Boy, Home for the Weekend

“Soldier Boy, Home for the Weekend” is the debut work of Jesse Aviv Wolfsthal, a seventeen year-old Jewish poet.

Soldier boy, home for the weekend.

He must be so glad to be able to rest, finally.

Finally. Right?

The small hours are quiet, they are small

of course, and there is only the whip-click of his lighter

and the clawing wisps of smoke

from the Marlboro forgotten between his forefinger

and his middle (it’s his third that hour).

Soldier boy, surrounded by brothers, yet there is

no one in his arms. Not injured, no.

Not scarred, not yet – that comes after.

Why then, can’t he sleep?

A boy with a gun in his hand

used to be a boy with a pen in his hand,

a brush in his hand,

his mother’s hand in his hand and now

he is a boy with a gun in his hand.

Fire, reload, fire, reload the chamber

but there is no gun on Earth

that can kill what follows Soldier boy into his room

each night and climbs into his hair while he sleeps,

clinging like cobwebs to the stubble on his scalp.

Hair that Ima used to stroke after a nightmare,

hair that Aba would ruffle and tease and trim with

big red kitchen scissors is gone now – forced to make room for                        

a helmet and a weight that no one knows how to ease.

If a gun is not what makes Soldier boy a man,

then what is? Is it

girlfriend after girlfriend or

is it the yellow fingernails, a calling card left by

nights and nights and nights of chain-smoking or

is it that which is so horrid that it cannot even be spoken of?

Is it that thing – that thing, that robs a boy of a boyhood,

and a man of an easy night’s rest?

Soldier boy rises, rusty chair legs scrape and clatter against concrete

and the butt of his fourth cigarette lands somewhere in the dark.

Inside, he goes, and tries again to fall asleep.

Visual design by Jill Blum