Masham Means Evening

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Masham Means Evening Page 1

by Kanina Dawson




  Book & Copyright Informaiton

  ©Kanina Dawson, 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll-free to 1-800-893-5777.

  This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Edited by Elizabeth Philips

  Designed by Tania Craan

  Typeset by Susan Buck

  Printed and bound in Canada

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Dawson, Kanina, 1975-

  Masham means evening / Kanina Dawson.

  Poems.

  ISBN 978-1-55050-550-4

  1. Afghan War, 2001- --Poetry. I. Title.

  PS8607.A962M38 2013 C811’.6 C2012-908199-X

  Issued also in electronic format.

  ISBN 978-1-55050-551-1 (PDF).--ISBN 978-1-55050-723-2 (EPUB).-- ISBN 978-1-55050-730-0 (MOBI)

  1. Afghan War, 2001- --Poetry. I. Title.

  PS8607.A962M38 2013 C811’.6 C2012-908200-7

  Available in Canada from:

  2517 Victoria Avenue

  Regina, Saskatchewan

  Canada S4P 0T2

  www.coteaubooks.com

  Publishers Group Canada

  2440 Viking Way

  Richmond, British Columbia

  Canada V6V 1N2

  Coteau Books gratefully acknowledges the financial support of its publishing program by: The Saskatchewan Arts Board, including the Creative Industry Growth and Sustainability Program of the Government of Saskatchewan via the Ministry of Parks, Culture and Sport; the Canada Council for the Arts; the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund; and the City of Regina Arts Commission.

  Dedication

  For my incredible daughter –may you never be afraid to spill your coffee.

  Love always, Mom.

  CONTENTS

  Kingston, January 2007 – 1

  Flights In – 2

  Landing in Kabul – 3

  The Road to Bagram – 4

  Souvenirs – 5

  Kabul University – 6

  Earthquake at Camp Julien – 8

  Electoral Candidate – 9

  Knock-offs – 10

  July in Brishna Kot – 11

  The Morning Commute – 12

  The White School House – 13

  Firefight – 14

  Working for the Coalition – 15

  The Wrong Crowd – 16

  Repatriation and a Rainstorm – 18

  Helicopter Crash – 19

  The General’s Briefing – 20

  Casting the Net – 21

  Shades of Grey – 23

  Incoming – 24

  Soft Things – 25

  An Awning of Birds – 26

  Friendly Fire – 27

  Little Bird – 28

  Medics on Their Break – 29

  Heavy – 30

  Fishing for Taliban – 32

  Optics – 33

  On the Wall – 34

  Start of the Rainy Season – 35

  Drowning in a Kharez – 36

  Killed by a Suicide Bomber, December 6 – 37

  Driftwood – 38

  Dangerous Men – 39

  Hearing from God – 40

  Fawns – 41

  Flights out of Howz-e Madad – 42

  Man From Uruzgan – 43

  Death Like Divorce – 44

  Omar – 45

  Mass Murder and a Dog Fight – 46

  Life on the Forward Operating Base – 47

  Embedded – 48

  Panjwayi – 49

  Not Wasting Time on Griefs That Don’t Matter – 50

  Halfway House – 51

  Seasons in Kandahar – 52

  Self-Immolation – 53

  Life in a Cemetery – 54

  The Only Chair in the Room – 55

  Dust Storm at Kandahar Airfield – 56

  Forecast – 57

  Disconnected – 58

  Taliban – 59

  A Night in Hospital – 61

  Ahmadullah’s Toes – 62

  August – 63

  Naming The Sound That Took His Life – 64

  Notes on a Soldier – 65

  Car Bomb – 66

  Burying the Rabbit – 67

  Market Scarf – 68

  Rain – 69

  Last Looks – 70

  Horizon Pool –71

  Masham Means Evening – 72

  Kingston, January 2007

  An itinerant sky is what’s wrong –

  its winds that shift and blow, its clouds that hang

  in shades of grey over students sipping coffee,

  their laughter and lofty sounding books crowding out my thoughts.

  It’s snowing. Everything smells of wet hem.

  How this winter wears me out.

  Watching others with their pocketed iPods, their trendy

  suede boots, I notice I am not nearly stylish enough and that I text real slow,

  like the growth of hair and nails.

  Around me people study, they learn

  linked head to head, or form a line to the cash like an isotherm.

  Their smiles are all the same temperature.

  I speak only to my coffee.

  In it, the desert blinks. It sees me,

  seizes me with its frayed rope –

  the twine of old men made older by war,

  binding each pomegranate in its crate.

  I turn my face to the window. I go back.

  I remember what it was

  to feel alive in that place,

  to do what mattered.

  How under that sun, my skin,

  like a husk of melon, was sweet.

  Flights In

  Weightless shake of plane keeps me awake.

  In the semi-dark I hear the sound of soldiers sleeping,

  involuntary legs afraid to be still,

  heads lolling, the smack of chins falling

  forward onto flak vests heavy as lead.

  I keep my rifle tucked between my knees.

  Farther down the row in the belly of the plane,

  a couple of sergeants are reading with their helmet lamps on,

  reminding me of home, of flashlights under the sheets

  and my daughter, laughing

  as she lit her face from beneath.

  We made forts under the stairs.

  At the airport she wouldn’t let me go.

  Eventually I had to hand her over, broken-

  hearted, her limbs as limp as her damp hair.

  How unfair

  that I should think of this now,

  desert-bound among the cargo netting and men,

  our plane droning on, our wingtips flashing in the black

  somewhere above the Gulf of Oman.

  Landing in Kabul

 
We spend hours in the air, en route to Kabul.

  I sleep until something like an impulse wakes me

  and I know it’s time to fumble for my helmet,

  put my flak vest on.

  A loadie moves through the dark, hand over hand

  towards the back of the plane. He steps carefully

  between our feet, a flashlight in his teeth.

  He carries a pistol and something like an extension cord.

  We are all roused from sleep.

  There’s a pause in the air, a slight downward shift

  like we’re tilting off a shelf, then I hear

  the mechanical windings of our descent

  and the plane falls into nothing I know.

  I know it’s not nothing, but still

  I am shaken, weightless as we bank

  left and right, up and down, avoiding

  what lies below – mountains of the Hindu Kush

  and shoulder-fired weapons.

  My ears feel about to burst.

  When we land it’s night and I’m surprised

  to see the lights of Kabul, twinkling, climbing the side of a hill

  like Grouse mountain in Vancouver.

  After the ramp comes down and I regain my feet,

  I half-expect the sirens I hear

  to be Vancouver City Police

  moving through traffic in Granville.

  The Road to Bagram

  Horizons away from where I am going

  we stop to change a tire on a road leading north.

  It’s littered with scrap metal, red and white painted rocks

  telling us to be careful of mines.

  Nearby is the faint clinking of goat bells

  and the remnants of a checkpoint

  where an Afghan guard is banging his pot against a metal post.

  A speed bump in the middle of nowhere is what he tends to.

  Long ago he might have kept a garden or read books.

  Now he smokes hash and merely stares at us as we pass,

  his AK slung, his kettle hung on a hook.

  The wind makes a moan that cuts across the sun,

  kicking up dust devils near an old Soviet tank

  destroyed over a decade ago – its side ripped open,

  its turret popped off and flung fifty feet

  down a gravelled slope – nothing

  history remembers. War came too many years ago,

  scattered too many teeth among the rocks

  where the goats now graze

  and where the guard goes to take a shit –

  uninterested in the lost jaw bone of some Russian

  whose parents no one can name.

  Souvenirs

  An Afghan man is smoking something harsh,

  sifting prayer beads through his hands,

  giggling at my arms – bare but for a watch.

  His teeth are dark like tarmac, like tobacco.

  Or the heat I see shimmering in shades of brown

  west of the mountains where he’s from –

  land of Massoud and pakol hats.

  When the Soviets were here, he downed helicopters

  and held freedom by the hip. All these years

  he’s managed to survive. Now in the shadow

  of a post 9/11 airstrip, I browse the market,

  buying bandoliers and Red Army badges,

  his Soviet souvenirs.

  Kabul University

  The principal shows me in to her office

  through a door that is cracked, punched

  full of bullet holes.

  Her heels click on the floor,

  a post-Taliban luxury for a woman –

  to make noise.

  She serves us green tea with honey

  in glasses that are chipped

  and we ignore the smell of mildew

  in the hallways as we sit – a smell like lamb’s wool

  left soured, sweating in the heat.

  On the hills behind us, demining operations

  shake the walls with the occasional controlled blast,

  rattling the windows as we stir our tea, our spoons

  trembling against glass. A rain of plaster

  falls from the ceiling, but the principal doesn’t flinch.

  She barely bats an eye. Just smiles, amused,

  at the dust in the air, at the pistol on my hip.

  I can tell what she’s thinking –

  that this war is a mountain.

  What good against it am I?

  Some girls have gathered in the doorways to watch us.

  Unveiled, they are giggling and graceful.

  Outside it’s a different story –

  a wordless ushering of blue burqas, whispering

  along the street, shuffling home in sandals, feet

  the same colour as the dirt.

  The principal tells us that even in Kabul

  a girl can still lose her nose, her face,

  her life, if she’s not careful. If she doesn’t stay

  covered up. You know, she says, rising to shoo

  boys away from her window, their hands

  pressed against the pane, we used to wear pants here.

  She smiles again, more sad this time,

  and motions for me to come see the place outside

  where last week an aid worker was shot to death

  in a courtyard that used to be filled with flowers –

  roses and rhododendron.

  Earthquake at Camp Julien

  Last week we were eating breakfast, Jess and I,

  sitting in the tent while the cooks peeled potatoes,

  when the world suddenly went dizzy. Our ears rang

  and something wriggled underfoot. I told him

  stop moving the table and he said he wasn’t.

  The light fixtures shook.

  Later we would learn that an earthquake

  had devastated parts of Pakistan, reaching

  down into Kabul. That a dozen school girls

  had died when their walls collapsed.

  We felt bad, but we’d already been there awhile

  and told ourselves how that kind of death

  was better than being killed by Taliban.

  They hated girls and killed them in ways

  way worse.

  So when the earthquake hit, Jess and I

  didn’t think in terms of loss. Instead

  we told cock-sucking jokes from Team America

  and spiralled out from the tent, laughing and falling,

  weightless in our ignorance of what was to come

  like passengers in a plane about to plummet.

  Electoral Candidate

  Woman in the Kabul marketplace

  canvasses to jeers, the eyes

  of her electoral photo gouged out.

  Like a Taliban commander

  she sleeps somewhere new

  every night – letters

  pinned to her door, telling her

  to walk away or face rape

  as reprisal.

  Even her brothers say she’ll only bring shame.

  Together they decide

  her fate for her instead –

  to hold her down by the ears, to slit

  her stomach until it grins.

  It’s a doctor who tells me this,

  describing how he tried

  to hold back her insides,

  to plug her stomach

  with his fist.

  Knock-offs<
br />
  In the ops room this morning I despised

  the pile of pirated DVDs

  recently acquired from the market

  and Tim’s new Rolex –

  a knock-off that he bought

  from an Afghan at the gate.

  I hate how Tim told us

  we’re not here for altruism.

  Then he looked right at me –

  like I was some kind of liability

  because yesterday at the airport,

  I threw some kid a bottle of water

  so he’d stop chasing our truck.

  So maybe later he and his friends

  wouldn’t learn as fast to hate us

  or take money for blowing us up.

  Tim keeps talking about it.

  He won’t let it die.

  When I try to tell him

  there are two sides to every coin

  he says – drop it. Then sighs

  and spits chew into a cup.

  You can’t afford to be soft out here, he says.

  You want them to get used to handouts?

  He frowns and sets the time on his watch,

  shaking his big bald head

  as though I’m stupid.

  July in Brishna Kot

  Mid-afternoon and the sun presses down

  against the back of my neck like one brick baking.

  Mountains waver in the distance. The city flexes and folds.

  From my place at the guard post I see the cemetery,

  its belt of green flags bristling, standing on end

  among a million stones.

  Motionless, except for one boy alone, walking home.

  The sky is a sheath born hot. It collects the sweat

  inside my helmet and gloves, along the inside of my legs –

  the hot chafe, the salt stick of feeling like I just wet myself

  is ever present.

  This part of Kandahar is a hot moon.

  A place where the dust goes up with each footfall

  and every cleft in the rock becomes somewhere to escape the sun.

  The markets are shuttered. The shops have all shut their eyes.

  White is the only wise colour now.

  Across the city, unexploded ordinance winds up like a ricochet,

 

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