Tina Barr
Civil War

Our geckos this year are copper, their scales
tiny shields; a tail quivers under a lily’s green
tower.

Hydrangeas carry tiny seed bouquets;
each will become a multi-flowered blue
bunch, shift to greens, pinks, maroons
as the seasons dry them. Like camouflage.

In my twenties I wore camo, charged
two HK 91s on a Visa card. We shot water
bottles, on a beach in Maine before a divorce.

In Minneapolis no one was playing at this.
You can tell George Floyd is scared, even
in the video from the restaurant, minutes
before he was pinned.

These last years
our geckos were grey, the color of split
rail fence. If you tear the blue tail off a
skink it regenerates.

That husband liked
to look; his peep-show visits tore me apart.

This husband wears a mask in the Post
Office, keeps six feet apart, but a woman
tried to pass him, wore no mask but fury,
told him to “fuck off,” when he stopped her.

Across the holler, someone target shoots;
I think, “Why isn’t he saving his ammo?”

Up here Fire Pinks, flowers with five
split petals, wild, bloom where they wish.

—Submitted on 05/30/2020

Tina Barr is the author of Green Target (Barrow Street Press, 2018), selected by Patricia Spears Jones for the Barrow Street Poetry Prize, and awarded the Brockman-Campbell Book Award, sponsored by the North Carolina Poetry Society and judged by Michael Waters. Barr’s earlier books include The Gathering Eye (Tupelo Press, 2004), winner of the Tupelo Press Editor’s Award; Kaleidoscope (Iris Press, 2015); and 3 chapbooks, all winners of national contests. Her poems have been appeared in Antioch Review, Barrow Street, Boulevard, Crab Orchard Review, Gettysburg Review, and other journals.

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