The War

I am a war. I am the pockmarked battlefield and the bruise-blue sky and the cases of bullets
and the trench and the simple soldier boy at the bottom of the trench. I am the field nurse and
the wounded private and the man in a pressed suit thousands of miles away, ordering
reinforcements. The destruction upon me is also me -- I am eating my own tail and choking
the whole time. I am the gun and the person holding the gun and the person being shot and
the ground under them that will have to catch the body. I am the fear and the thing that the
fear lives inside of. That thing standing at the end of the hall in the dark -- it has my hands.
Neither of us know how to touch things softly. There is no shapely secret at the core of me,
only more of this. I am the only thing inhabiting myself. I am the war and the cities burning
in its wake and the people begging for it to be over. I am fourteen and knock-kneed and
apologizing to my mother in the kitchen for the piece missing from her favorite vase. I am the
vase. I am the kitchen. I do not know where the piece is.

Maeve Z O'Connor is an artist, hedonist, and devotee of the theatrical and strange. Her work has been featured in the Fertile Ground Festival of New Works, Bridge: The Bluffton Literary Journal, and on the air on KBOO.FM radio. She draws a great deal of inspiration from her home state of Oregon, where her plays Omission and Leaving Manzanita premiered. She can often be found annotating horror novels and compiling atrocious vintage-inspired outfits.