CNN Report: Rise in Sexual Assault, Reprisals in the Military (2016)
By Karen Skolfield
It’s not just the stars
these last mornings
I failed to see.
No light pollution.
My flashlight
the walk’s metronome.
Consider how no one takes
the stories of stars seriously
these days. The journalist
asked me what I thought
of my time in the military.
It’s the motion of a deer
that catches my eye,
makes me look back and see
a sunrise I almost missed.
Blazing and violent,
and once it’s gone,
no evidence it ever existed.
“CNN Report: Rise in Sexual Assault, Reprisals in the Military (2016)” reprinted from Battle Dress: Poems. Copyright © 2019 by Karen Skolfield. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.
Karen Skolfield’s book Battle Dress (W. W. Norton, 2019) won the Barnard Women Poets Prize. Her book Frost in the Low Areas (Zone 3 Press) won the 2014 PEN New England Award in poetry, and she is the winner of the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize in poetry from The Missouri Review. Skolfield is a U.S. Army veteran and teaches writing to engineers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. www.karenskolfield.com
