Come Sailor Let’s Make War on Time by Jehanne Dubrow


 

Come, sailor, let’s make war on time.
These last few nights before you are deployed
the minutes go torpedo-fast, and I’m
afraid we’re targeted. Something’s destroyed
our few square feet of peace. The room is still
as if we’re waiting for the sonar’s ping
to find our positions. We do not fill
the bed with words. Acoustic quieting,
the soft absorption of each thud and shock,
the deep sound channel where we hide—we try
whatever tactic might avoid the clock,
how it locates us no matter where we lie.
In fact, it’s time that makes a war on us,
a nearing tick-tick-tick. Continuous.

 


 

Read TJ Jarrett’s interview with Jehanne Dubrow in Women in Form

 


 

Jehanne Dubrow is the author of four poetry collections, including most recently Red Army Red and Stateside. In 2015, University of New Mexico Press will publish her fifth book of poems, The Arranged Marriage. Her work has appeared in Southern Review, The New England Review, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, and Ploughshares. She is the Director of the Rose O’Neill Literary House and an Associate Professor of creative writing at Washington College, on the Eastern Shore of Maryland.