My name is Ellis Elliott and I am proud to be a part of the Old Scratch Poetry Collective. I recently read Ben Weakley’s first poetry collection, Heat + Pressure. Ben is an Army veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan. I am not one normally drawn to books or movies about war, because it is much easier to keep something at a safe distance, to pretend it’s not there, if we do not engage with it. But poetry has a particular way of helping us see with new eyes, and this time the writer is bringing us along with him on patrol with his infantry, at home with his young son, watching the events of Jan. 6, and back to his childhood, when war meant a game to be played. This collection is visceral as well as lyrical, and will linger long after you’ve read the last poem.
Field Dressing
The silent doe stiffened in her bed of leaves,
where moments ago she fell, panting.
Her last breath rattled.
Life passed from nutbrown eyes
into damp January morning.
The snow wrapped us in a womb of silence.
My frost-tipped fingers gripped tight
around the stained handle of a buck-knife,
the curved edge trembling.
Warm against my back, my father’s hand.
Soft against my ear, my father’s voice—
Careful, son. Cut gently.
We eat what we kill.
We honor the animal.
We honor the dead who gave us life.
Boys like me are not made with words enough for this.
-Ben Weakley
OLD SCRATCH PRESS 