THE WARTIME ISSUE Fred Joiner   HOME IS WHERE THE WAR IS Matthew Pickett, 21,…. beaten....by 10 young men…. hit in the head with a metal pipe...he loved kids….police charged a 15 year old. Pickett… son of an Army Ranger…waited to go to basic training at Fort Benning, in Georgia, next month…Pickett ..suffered injuries …falling…he enjoyed reading and writing poetry –—excerpts from two Washington Post articles It was not the sound of jagged fury slicing through air toward flesh not the armed discontent of brotherhood's illusion in a foreign land not a land mine in the shadow of every step it happened here where life is not supposed to be so fragile here where we are supposed to live be hind a shield where we have the luxury of finding God in a silent way in sanctuaries not made of ruin. in this place a recruit untouched by Basic Training's breaking or combat's hot breath learned about rules of engagement, that warfare visits on its own terms learned how a pipe without explosives can still send shrapnel tearing through families the war of this place taught him that homeland's concrete and foreign soil are mixed with the same hard sand     Fred Joiner is a poet living in Washington, DC's Historic Anacostia. During the day Fred masquerades as a Systems Administrator for a small progressive consulting company. When he is not masquerading, his passions are poetry, photography, making collages, and the culture and history of the African Diaspora. His work has appeared in Warpland: A Journal of Black Literature and Ideas and is forthcoming in a chapbook.   Published in Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2006.   To read more by this author: Fred Joiner: Audio Issue Fred Joiner: DC Places Issue Fred Joiner