On the Day 14 Marines Were Killed in Anbar Province

By Max Sutton

This noon the gym seems busier than usual, the labor force

at work on abs, calves, quads, lats, triceps, biceps.

Boys pump iron dumbells before the mirror, body builders

groan and swell, mothers tighten inner thighs.

Old maintenance men like me on slack machines pause

between pulls, while young women on treadmills

watch “All My Children” or “Days of Our Lives,”

some waiting for “The Bold and the Beautiful.”

Off to one side, CNN captions the president’s words:

THEY DIED FOR A NOBLE CAUSE.

Here muscles are the body armor: pectoral slabs

for breastplate, meat packed along the back and shoulders,

taut obliques, stalwart glutes. In this cooled space

drumbeats and ranting voices from the Fitness

Network launch the only assaults on the tall athlete

and his girlfriend trying to chat

between sets. Defenseless on the bench,

he presses the loaded bar, dancing

his feet like a Greek or Trojan struck down

in dust but stands up smiling at her, yawns

for air, resumes the chat, then strides for the shower,

whole in body, safe in his heartland.

The fourteen might have been Hessians,

hired to fight our war.

– Max Sutton, who won the 2005 Langston Hughes Creative Writing Award for poetry, lives in Lawrence. He taught English at Kansas University for nearly 40 years.