I Like to Touch Your Scars in Complete Darkness

Author: Kelly White Arnold

I like to touch your scars in complete darkness,

bend my fingers over the battlefield of your back, reading

your flesh with my own, pondering the violence

of the life before us. The circle scar on your spine,

the thin white line, where knife pierced thumb that afternoon

in a ruined building in Mogadishu, your skin breaking

its promise to hold you in, to keep you intact,

country betraying the creed it made you learn by heart,

leaving you, my heart, in a city choked by thick oil of tire smoke

and the rubble of a ruined Blackhawk. Your poor dumb

thumb, you call it, mute marker to a night spent propped

against a crumbling wall defending crumbling ideals

that blur further as blood leaks from your body, stains

the gauze that binds everything but your trigger finger. You

count remaining bullets, listen with concussed eardrums

for the approach of danger’s dusty footfalls. In the end,

you save yourself, walk out of a decimated city daylight, slog

through sand and back to a life we’d build together, on foot

because the humvees are loaded with the grim cargo of the dead

and dying. Even now, they live in the lines of these scars, their weight

the price of a life of relative normalcy, their memory an indelible mark

you carry—

we carry.

*Inspired by Kim Addonizio’s “First Poem for You”

Kelly White Arnold (she/her) is a mom, writer, teacher, and lover of yoga. Her work has recently appeared in Petigru Review, Hellbender, and Reedy Branch Review.  She lives in the North Carolina Piedmont with her two favorite humans and one unhinged cat, but she dreams of mountains beneath her feet.