Collateral

the after-action report reads clean enough—
no friendly fire, acceptable losses,
mission parameters met.

what it doesn’t say
is that she stopped eating for eleven days,
kept his sweatshirt in a ziplock bag
so the smell wouldn’t leave before she was ready.

Or that she still has the letter he wrote, explaining everything, and nothing

he still flinches
at the sound of a certain laugh
across a crowded bar—
a laugh that sounds like hers,
which sounds like freedom;
and sounds like a door
closing in another room.

the fog of war, they call it.
as if confusion
were the problem.

someone bought a new journal after.
someone else
started seeing a woman named Jane
every Thursday at four
who nodded and said
tell me more about that.

there are twelve of them, give or take—
Some reorganized their kitchens,
deleted the playlist,
learned to sleep
on the other side of the bed.

I keep the report in a drawer
next to an old Blockbuster card
and a fortune cookie I never threw away
that says “you are capable of great things.”

the debrief never mentions
who filed it.
or that the author
appears nowhere in the count
until you read the footnotes,
which nobody does,
which is the point,
which is the whole
goddamn
point.