The brown bess watches him undress
at night, bones and naked, shivering
like men shiver.

Today, it is too cold to go to war,

he says, It is human to suffer;
and soldiers watch him as he sinks back
into his tent where he sobs silently,

like an old widow.

Jack Galati is an MFA candidate at Northern Arizona University. His fiction and poetry has appeared in a number of journals and magazines including Mignolo Arts, The Closed Eye Open, and Lone Mountain Lit.