Jeri Theriault

My Father on Iwo Jima

 
The first thing I saw when we got to the beach
was dead bodies, my father told the reporter.

He never told me about the black beaches
below Mount Suribachi. Or that someone yelled

flag’s up during that famous photo op.
It was quite a thrill to see that flag,

he told the reporter, though the battle had just
begun, shells filling the air with smoke.

He crawled snail-like under bullets and got
so much sand in his boots he couldn’t move his toes.

I wore the same clothes for 28 days, he told the reporter. 
He didn’t mention the machine gun

he took over from his dead pal. Or how he kept
shooting long after he was wounded. He never told me

about the medals for “conspicuous gallantry.” I could
still see their faces—those fellas that were lost, he told

the reporter, as though his memory were a war
movie. I couldn’t help feeling glad to be alive,

sitting there alone on the beach. —Maybe he was crying.
Maybe all the men still alive at the end

were crying. The smell of rotting bodies turned my stomach,
he said fifty years later. Reading what the reporter wrote

brings him no closer. I invent a father with more
to say—how exactly that gun felt. Where it hurt.

Jeri Theriault’s poetry collections include Radost, my red (Moon Pie Press) and In the Museum of Surrender, first place winner of the 2013 Encircle Chapbook Contest. She is the editor of WAIT: Poems from the Pandemic (Littoral Books). Her poems and reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in journals such as The Rumpus, The Texas Review, The New Ohio Review, and Plume. A Fulbright recipient and three-time Pushcart Prize nominee, she won the 2022 NORward Prize (New Ohio Review) and a 2019 Maine Literary Award for poetry. Jeri spent six years of her teaching career as English Department Chair at the International School of Prague, and now lives in South Portland, Maine.

Learn more about Jeri at www.jeritheriault.com