E.R. Vanett

AMERICAN COFFIN

The American coffin rushed out the door. Monday morning. Early. To work. To labor. To earn a
paycheck. To pay bills. Industrial and rigid, he goes. Another day. Plunging himself into alcohol,
then pills. Tuesday the music on the radio plays as he places sugar cubes into the breakfast cup.
Stirring the milk as a lathe. Wednesday evenings are spent staying up late by TV dinners and
bottleneck beer bottles. The La-Z-Boy chair has a rip in the arm where the dog he used to own
chewed it. Then Thursday is met with sweat, the homily of hard work. The piledriver hums to
life while diesel engines and oil pump another hour into the Earth. And by Friday, the last
sanctuary, comes with aching feet and drive through burgers. The streets to Pendleton are filled
with trash. And little daisies. He returns from work. The heaviest lid lies awake in his soul,
awaiting finality when his body crashes into the pillows. Rest. In the apartment upstairs he hears
the cries of a baby. On Saturday, he sleeps. His muddy boots by the doorway lie dormant. In
hibernation for the next week ahead. The weekly weakness of man is preceded on the
forgiveness of Sunday. He missed church again. And the American Coffin, like Lazarus, rises to
the sounds of new morning mercies.

BOYHOOD

I’m sure half of you – still in boyhood
                wades in shallow, muddy waters –
desires true goodness. Virtue. The call to valor.
All things manhood.

And the good, simple heart looks out a window
                   to find yellow finches singing in sunlight.
In the summer of boyhood. I saw myself there
          -laughing. No call to arms.
We moved like salamanders under rocks.

My back screams, sweat drips, my aching feet in combat boots.
Miles of terrain ahead.
And then…I felt my good, simple heart cry out
          -swans! Dancing there. Over the ledge of water.
“I love you,” he says in the dark.
          And the swans stretch out their wings over black waters
where twilight consumed them,
soaring. A couple.

Then the boy stands in a pool of slimy water,
lily pads ripple and bob at the sudden realization of what just happened.
It was an accident, he said tears staining his cheeks,
I didn’t mean to. The boy sobbed,
holding onto a dead frog.

BLEED

I can imagine where you knelt down, like a soldier crouched over sandbags, ready to pull the
trigger –to pull out a ring– but instead marked a new departure. Then you take the city train.
Exiting my life. The tremor of the machine gun burned in my hand, hot like the something more
that crossed between us.

Grains of sand leave little indentations on my palms, discoloring the skin. Sometimes the little
pores open up —because of the trauma — accepting reality for what it is. Then they pour out
over themselves. And bleed.

You seemed so happy to see me last time we spoke. So happy it bled over onto me. Then we
were both bleeding in the happiness. And I took the blood all over you and smeared it all over
me. And you loved it. Really smiling. Wiping your blood all over me.

THE FALL 18 September 2025

A soldier. A young man who wandered onto the 8th floor where he wasn’t supposed to. He
shouldn’t have been there. If you told me the poem This Happened by C.K. Williams would
happen to me in real life, I probably wouldn’t believe you. But this happened. All of the soldiers
– we ran – across the street. To the barracks. To the place where he landed. The awkward shape
of his body, limbs laying in the grass. The spatter of dirt stretched over cement where his leg
snapped. We wanted to save him, tried to save him. The paramedics said his pulse was there. But
it was not there. I wish Williams hadn’t written about falling so elegantly. What right does he
have, writing about falling that way? And what kind of poem is it when a man lets himself fall?
For a moment, he must not have been the person he is. Was that what C.K. meant? I mean, he
became his own premeditation. Battling plagues and ghosts within. And in the process,
abandoned his truer-self for this other version of him. He had to climb up to do it. To go over the
balcony. To give into the ghosts. Then let himself fall. It happened. Without grace.

E.R. Vanett is a South Bend–born poet whose writing emerges from the lived realities of working‑class America and her experience as a Soldier. Her poems navigate the aftermath of service, the weight of labor, and the small, human moments that survive inside them. She earned her B.A. in English Literature from Indiana University and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing. Her work appears in Big Bend Literary Magazine, Taint Taint Taint Magazine, Retirement Plan, Oakland Arts Review, and Analecta.  

Banner Art:
Grass-land Yellow Finch, Dominic Sherony, Wikimedia Commons, 2009

Back
Next