Small Arms Weapons as Caretaking Baby Dolls

Poet’s Note:

This piece is part of a larger project called “My Prayer a Slit Throat: erasing the inheritance of war.” In early 2021, I was revisiting The Iliad with its mixture of startling clarity, tenderness, and horror. I was interested in exploring how this attitude still shapes our cultural narratives around war. My source materials come from war ephemera in the Western canon; different modes of erasure are explored with each source text. Guidebook for Marines is erased by chapter, but I allow myself to swap out the chapter name, so the chapter “small arms weapons” becomes “babydolls.”