My brother and I agree

our father returned from

that frozen reservoir in Korea

with deities attached to him,

but not just any kind of deity.

What followed the lieutenant home

was the kind of deity that thrives on chaos,

on division and terror and bloodshed.

For lack of a better term for it, we agreed to call it

chaos demon, the demon of war.

Although in retrospect it seems

overkill that we would find ourselves

battling Korean war demons in childhood,

since similar demons had already

saturated the Pacific Northwest soil

with the spoils of the Puget Sound Wars

a century before either of us was born.

Chaos demons thrived where countless thousands

whose tribe had no word for war died at the hands of tools

programmed to serve the greedy colonists taking everything,

from the fertile land to the name of the mountain once called Tahoma,

renamed Rainier after the admiral and his chaos demons.

Which makes it hard to say whether

the demon in the wall who tried to

take my brother to that place of no return

was Korean, or native to the Enumclaw Plateau.

It would only matter if there’s a distinction between them

other than the obvious, which was that it thrived on chaos

and devouring the innocence of children.

It thrived on families torn apart,

on the perversions of faith that lead to

sexual abuse, indoctrination into

false narratives, and all things

that go unspoken but need

to be held up to the light and studied

for the kernel of truth they contain.

It is those truths the chaos demons

do not want us to discover, their

greatest fear being the formation

of a cohesive picture of the chaos

in which they thrive.

Cohesion is kryptonite to chaos.

Which is why there has never been

an explanation for why I never heard

the innocent laughter of my little brother

after the chaos demon of war promised

I would never hear it again.

Nor does it explain the manufacturing of demons

those resource capitalists are so fond of.

Manufacturing chaos demons in the Halls of Congress,

with the help of chaos demons in the Senate prayer breakfasts

with their chaos demons promoting war in the

badly translated new international versions of badly translated missives

from entities promoting the chaos of war in their name.

Crusades and Inquisitions One and Two Point Oh

Wars of Roses and wars of bread and circuses,

ratings wars, drug wars and culture wars

are all how we feed them

and yet knowing this has never helped me

bring my brother back from that place

the chaos demon took him

when we were too young

to know how to manage an evil

none of us have ever been taught

how to manage,

since the chaos demons

have made sure we never learn.

Because knowledge is power

and the chaos demons of war

don’t want us to have the power it takes

to use the kryptonite we are all born with

to smother them with cohesion.

For Gregor

© Adrienne Veronese

They accuse us of weaponizing our tears,

yet when those tears are spent 

and we have no choice but to 

wave the white flag 

and change the locks, the 

best we can do in the endless cold war

we’re left with 

is 

file the necessary forms 

in the bureaucracy they built 

on the proliferation of war.



A war that allows for

the weaponizing of our children 

so they might better deliver 

lethal payloads 

sent in retaliation 

every 

other 

Sunday, 

aimed directly at hearts 

already broken 



      ( leaving a scorched earth in which

       spirits die at the bottom of their bomb craters 

       where collateral damage is considered

       fair game, 

       and children with battle fatigue

       are left to dig their way out

       and struggle with the fog of war

       in which 

       all of it is the mother’s fault.)



So in learning how much there is to gain 

from endless war 

they doubled-down 

and weaponized our sons 

even further,

sending them to die thinking of their mothers

in their final embrace with that war machine 

that was built to last 

an 

eternity.



And because there were those 

who saw how little there was to gain 

from allowing us to connect 

on the deepest level, 

they weaponized intimacy 

and gave us 

shame 

placing emphasis on the construct that 

it’s woman who gave us original sin,

so man had no choice but to invent war 

and blame her 

for 

making him do it.

© Adrienne Veronese

International Women’s Day

       March 2021

Photo by Stewart MacLean on Unsplash

 With Gratitude

(a Thanksgiving Poem)

I will eat these late-season berries

blue

as the sky on better days.

I will roast this squash

with oils pressed

 from fruit of the the olive branch  

the one the dove carried in her heart

through a sky woven of prayers

for better days

days in which

gratitude was balanced

between thought and prayer

between branch

and wing,

between darkness

and blue that glistens

as these berries do,

and nothing

nothing

was taken for granted.

Photo by Daniils Petrovs on Unsplash

He was woke.

He'd been on a pilgrimage to Maté Latte.

His man bun was untidy and his five-day growth perfectly trimmed.

His mother sent him skinny jeans and quinoa facial scrub for Samhain each year,

and his lover wore it natural downtown.

It was the best of times, it was the hipster of times

and none of us were sure we would survive reaping what the evangelicals liked to sow.

But he was doing his best to elevate his vibrational frequencies with crystals

and fresh cannabis leaf smoothies.

It was the most anyone could expect of a Prius owner.

© Adrienne Veronese