About the Author As a writer and teacher Hallie Moore is a west coast trained: Stanford BA,MA and Antioch Los Angeles MFA, but now lives on the Texas Gulf Coast. Moore's work has appeared in such print journals as Borderlands, Texas Review, Blue Mesa, Calyx, Spillway, Suddenly V, and several online publications such as The Adirondack Review, Moon Dance, Branches Quarterly,etc. Moore's current project is a chapbook entitled So Many Gods. Road Tag, The News, and Cross Hairs-- WWII and Others are Moore's first poems in Nuvein.

I was ten, our TV the first on the street.

A 15-inch bubble in pickled-oak, brass

handles on double doors. Dad teetered

over the roof all day, lashing the antenna down

a cartoon tree, its skinny trunk and branches

wobbling on the ridgeline in the late day wind.

We shaded our eyes, watched wires tighten

in the eyebolts, as mom hollered out from inside

about snow on Channel Five, static on Eleven.

The neighbors ogled up, hoping to get invited over.



We kids felt rich - Davy Crockett

sharpened his knife at our house. We

had wrestlers, puppets, Ed Sullivan fixing

popcorn in our living room. We watched it all.

Ate macaroni from aluminum pans

balanced on our knees or wobbly trays, took

turns jumping up to change the channel,

talked out loud only during commercials.

Older, I nagged mom to stay up to see the flag wave

and saw it once before Korea slogged through

my house on the ten o'clock news.



A grainy Pork Chop Hill and Heartbreak Ridge

in black and white with a voice shouting,

"What you are hearing, ladies and gentlemen,

is live gunfire coming from the North." Shivering,

dirty men crouched over mess kits eating Spam,

then a field hospital, a soldierâs bloody face

who looked like my cousin Mike, cried for his mom.

From then on, I'd try to get to bed before ten.

If not asleep, my head under the pillow

before the news could abandon me to barbed-wire,

mud and live ammo screaming over head.