Peacocks
by Lee Stockdale
The Polish Labor Service feeds them like kings and queens, blue-green peacocks who wander this base and fan in front of a line of tanks, making a tanker pop out of his turret, yank off his headphones and yell, Fucking move! before inching his metal behemoth forward.
The tanker, again, halts in front of the peacock, who stares at, and tells him: We are guests of the Polish Labor Service, humble men, gentle and kind, whose families were killed in the Nazi holocaust, who keep this base tidy and, really, for what? For the grace of living like elderly orphans in barracks not as nice as for American GIs who’ll transfer back to The World in a year to girlfriends and mamas and Chevrolets. Go ahead, run me over, so that back in Iowa, when you hold your sweetheart, she’ll feel a peacock’s blood on your hands.
The tanker’s captain jumps out of his jeep. They have deadlines to meet at Ramstein Air Base. The captain waves to shoo it away, but the peacock won’t move, and now it’s joined by a sister peacock, who fans and preens and screams in the street.
Lee Stockdale has won the United Kingdom National Poetry Prize and other prizes. His work appears in The Poetry Review, The Guardian, and elsewhere. His debut collection, Gorilla, was published in 2022, by Main Street Rag. He and his wife, both veterans, live in Asheville, North Carolina, USA.
‘Peacocks’ won second place in The Prose Poem’s 2024 Prose Poetry Competition.