Call Us What We Carry Read Online Free PDF Page B

casual meaning
    “By chance” or “accident.”
    But bloodshed in war is no misfire.
    Perhaps casualty means that war itself
    Is the accident, unmistakably a mistake,
    Our big, fat, bloody oops!
----
    * * *
    The second step in warfare & pandemics
    Is the same: continuation,
    To uphold remaining modes of connection & communication. Writing letters to the home front was encouraged among WWI service personnel & volunteers abroad so as to raise national morale. The British Army Postal Service delivered around 2 billion letters during their involvement in the conflict. In the US, 1917’s General Orders No. 48 stated that “Soldiers, sailors, and marines assigned to duty in foreign countries are entitled to mail letters ‘free’ ” . . . by marking on the envelopes OnActive Service . . . During the war, A. E. F. Camp Crane in Allentown, Pennsylvania, reported its post office handling nearly 70,000 pieces of mail per week. The home front is a pen. Pen us in. We swear we can be good.
----
    * * *
    Listen closely.
    Are you listening?
    There is no such thing as gentle war.
    There is no peace
    That can’t be flung aside.
    Our only enemy is that which would
    Make us enemies to each other.
----
    * * *
    Snail mail?
    More like whale mail.
    It is the only thing
    With a mouth wide enough to speak
    When we have nothing left
    To say. All this to say,
    Writing our stories
    Is an essential service.
    It is how we go to war.
    Most importantly,
    It is how we end it.
    We’re still willing to believe
    Peace is a place on earth.
----
    * * *
    A century past World War I, condolence cards sold out in 2020. A majority of United States Postal Service users agree that receiving letters raises their spirits & one in six send more mail now during the pandemic. In pandemics, everything is scarce except for grief. Writing, truth-telling to one another, is an act of hope-making when hope is hardest found. What place have we in our histories except the present.
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    * * *
    Aperture:
    The hole in the eye
    Through which light travels.
    The word peace shares history
    With pact . That is to say, harmony
    Is a tomorrow we agree on.
    We’re more conditioned
    To contagion than combat.
    But a virus, just like a war, separates us
    From our fellow people.
    Yet if we are willing, the cut
    Can be an aperture, the hole
    Through which we reach for the whole
    Of one another.
    A virus is fought inside us,
    While violence is fought amongst us.
    In both, our triumph is not in conquering others,
    But conquering the most destructive agents
    & instincts that we carry
    Within our mortal forms.
    Hate is a virus.
    A virus demands a body.
    What we mean is:
    Hate only survives when hosted in humans.
    If we are to give it anything,
    Let it be our sorrow
    & never our skin.
    To love just may be
    The fight of our lives.

The Ship
    THE FELLOWSHIP
    B Well
    The ship calls you man. Bullet, refrain from going into public places. Service is putting good to all civil rights, causes, nations, our form. O order so vicious has been issued in many. Democracy before war.
    B Well §§

    §§ April 1918 letter from Mrs. Ida B. Wells-Barnett, President of the Negro Fellowship League, to United States President Woodrow Wilson. In the letter she protests General Ballou’s Bulletin Number 35 for the 92nd Division, Camp Funston, Kansas, which urged officers & soldiers of color against entering public places where they were unwanted due to their race. National Archives.

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Fig . I

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Fig . III

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Fig. VII

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Fig. V

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    * Description of a Slave Ship . London: Printed by James Phillips [for the London Committee of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade], 1789. Two broadsides. This is perhaps the best-known depiction of a