Not long ago, during a Q&A, a woman in the audience asked me about the danger of writing about the small objects from our ordinary lives. I had just finished reading poems and prose that examined my experiences of being married to a retired U.S. Navy officer. In a poem titled “What Do You Give the War that Has Everything,” I had recited a litany of gifts, each one inspired by the presents that couples customarily offer one another on every new year of marriage. Paper. Cotton. Leather. The piece ends with emeralds and diamonds which are, respectively, the traditional gifts for the 55th and 60th wedding anniversaries:

The war took anything we had to give.

Decades on, we gave emeralds for

the green of some forgotten field.

 

We gave the war a diamond,

to honor its cleave and glittering,

its dreadful way of capturing the light.

Next, I read “Seventy-Seven Steps,” an essay from my most recent book of nonfiction, in which I recounted the wartime histories of mid-century furniture—including Emeco’s 1006 Navy Chair—to make sense of why I had “brought the traces of war inside my home so willingly.” I closed the reading with an Elizabethan sonnet. In “Trench Whistle,” a speaker calls to her dogs by blowing on the same kind of whistle used by infantry officers during the first world war. These whistles once directed line after line of men into battle, soldiers climbing out of the trenches and heaving their bodies toward the dead region of no man’s land, that grim nothing of concertina wire and bare earth where there was little protection from the mortar rounds. The poem ends with the bleak chiming of rhyme. “I call, and each dog runs, / unhunted by the terror of the guns.”

On that evening, I knew, even before the woman raised her hand, that she was upset. Throughout my reading, she sat cross-armed in the second row. She wore a black leather jacket, and her hair was cut at a sharp angle and I couldn’t help but see anger in its shine. She began her question with a story. “Thanksgivings at my family’s house are complicated,” she started. “My sister is married to a man in the military. She loves him. But the rest of us just want to know how she can stay with someone who chooses to participate in America’s incessant wars overseas.”

She paused. And I thought about her sister, how she must have dreaded those annual dinners, how she must have wished for the silence of chewing, the voiceless click of forks against plates, the occasional murmur of water sliding into a glass. I thought about the missed opportunities at those family meals: for empathy, for the chance to understand a perspective different from one’s own. I almost said, I would love to give your sister copies of my books so that maybe she will feel less alone. Instead, I waited for the woman to go on.

“What I’m wondering is: by writing about these small, familiar objects, aren’t you missing the opportunity to critique America’s wars and invasions?”

For nearly twenty years, I have been answering some version of this question. I first began to write about what it’s like to be a military spouse shortly after my husband and I married. He had just finished another deployment, and we were finally living together in Lincoln, Nebraska, where I was earning a Ph.D. and he was assigned to teach with the ROTC unit on campus. It would be one of two brief periods—in the first fifteen years of our marriage—during which we shared the same home. After we left the Midwest, I moved to Maryland to begin my first tenure-track position, and he was sent back to Virginia, followed by a sequence of deployments and billets that often separated us for many months. We once went for nearly a year without hearing the other’s voice. Our marriage often felt like a rubber band stretched taut, the intimacy between us an elastic thing but also delicate, vulnerable to snapping.

At the time, the United States was a few years into its wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Although I was deeply opposed to these conflicts, I wasn’t interested in writing poems about American foreign policy. The daughter of two U.S. Foreign Service Officers, I spent most of my childhood overseas in countries like Yugoslavia, Zaire, Poland, Belgium, and Austria, landscapes shaped by genocide, war, and civil division. I had experienced firsthand the consequences of America’s involvement in the workings of other nation states, their politics, their newspapers.

But, as a poet, what interested me most were questions of intimacy. In a military marriage, how do we maintain emotional closeness even as physical distance persists? How do we continue to love someone whose work terrifies or repulses us? Are there parts of the beloved that remain unknowable, no matter how we attempt to understand him?

The poems I began to write were set in the bedroom, our blankets sometimes a contested region and sometimes a neutral zone. I wrote poems of the kitchen and the bathroom mirror. Through familiar, accessible objects, I could make war tangible, easier to hold onto. I could lift war to the light, could turn it in my hands, studying its angles.

I wrote sonnets about packing my husband’s seabag (“each canvas pocket emptied of regret”), sonnets about the strangeness of living in military housing (“Oh, look— / another flag, another garden gnome, / another sign proclaiming Home, Sweet Home.”), and even sonnets about the war movies that played on our television (“Each movie is a training exercise, / a scenario for how my husband dies.”). Those fourteen lines functioned as a container for small items—wedding rings, personal photographs—emblematic of war and of the pressures that global conflict placed on our marriage. The sonnet was like a glass case inside which each combustible emotion remained safe enough to examine.

When I started sending out the poems that eventually became part of the first book in my military spouse trilogy, Stateside, I received a few furious rejections. We don’t publish military propaganda, one editor scribbled in red ink at the bottom of the journal’s standard rejection slip.  It was strange because none of these poems praised the U.S. military. I was highly critical of this life of uniformity. But, in loving my husband and in struggling to understand him through lyric forms, I was viewed by some as complicit in the machinery of war.

I received similar responses when I began to submit the poems that formed the book that I wrote as a sequel to Stateside. Dots & Dashes explores what it’s like to be both a military spouse and an academic, a member of two communities that speak very different—and often incompatible—languages. The collection emerged out of the experiences I had while promoting Stateside at civilian and military institutions around the country. In “Five Poetry Readings,” I wrote about a visit to the U.S. Naval Academy, where I stood in an echoing basketball stadium alongside a renowned soldier-poet and we recited our work to 1000 drowsy midshipmen. Later in the poem, I describe another event, this one at the Naval War College. At the edge of the room, I saw a military spouse and began to speak just for her:

This isn’t the first time

I’ve found myself

speaking to the only spouse in a crowd

of officers, as if we’re always pulled

 

to what’s familiar,

both of us trying

to determine our places relative to land.

And I wrote about tinier things. In “Tackle Box,” I describe where my husband stored “the insignias of his work— / pins in the shape of oak leaves, / shoulder boards, ribbons, / oceans of obedience.” I found in my tiny, tattered copy of The Fireside Book of Verse inspiration for a new poem. This small anthology was published as part of the Armed Services Editions during WWII, which were editions designed to fit in the pockets of soldiers shipped overseas. “This book / was never meant to last a war much less / three quarters of a century,” observes my pocket-sized sonnet. And, yet, here was this small volume. It had endured even though it was printed to be disposable.

With Dots & Dashes, I was again drawn to writing about war through objects that can be touched and tasted and smelled. In one sonnet, for instance, I write about a fancy chocolate shop that once existed in that iconic building of war. “He brings me chocolate from the Pentagon,” the poem starts. “He brings me chocolate ships, a submarine / descending in a chocolate sea, a drone / unmanned and filled with hazelnut praline.” Eros is paired with Thanatos, desire with death, to think about the ways that war seduces, the way it enters the domestic spaces of a military marriage.

Later, when my husband retired from the Navy after twenty years of service, I realized there was still more to say. What happens when the uniform is set aside and the active duty servicemember becomes a civilian again? What happens to a spouse who had been a “dependent,” an official government label I had always rejected. I was hardly dependent on my husband, no matter what my plastic ID said in big block letters. Nonetheless, that word had been part of my identity for a decade and a half. And I needed to reckon with its loss.

Civilians is a book about the specific challenges that a military marriage faces. But it’s also a book about an ordinary marriage. Military service often rendered my husband strange and unfamiliar. There were parts of his work that I found unnerving. Those hundreds of military acronyms, abbreviated speech that polishes violence to such a high sheen it loses much of its terror. And yet every marriage—including a union between two civilians—contains mystery. Don’t we all feel at certain times that the beloved is not entirely knowable? This person who sleeps beside us is a deep ocean.

When I submitted Civilians to my press, an external reviewer argued that it failed to address “statecraft, toxic masculinity, and complicity in the carnage of war and American imperialism.” The reviewer asserted that “although Dubrow occasionally alludes to her speaker’s ambivalence toward the spouse’s military service, the glancing references strike me as empty rhetorical gestures rather than steps toward a complex moral reckoning.” How do any of usreckon with a marriage? In graduate school, a classmate once asked me what it was like to love a babykiller. Is this the kind of moral reckoning that the external reviewer wished to see in my poems?

As a teacher of creative writing, I try to help my students meet a text on its own terms. Complaining that a red canvas should be blue makes for poor criticism. The external reviewer wanted my book about marriage to be a treatise on American foreign policy. I am eager to read such poems. But they are not what I aspire to write.

In a response to my anonymous reader’s criticisms of the Civilians, I drafted a poem titled “Domestic Policy.” The poem recounts a fight in which the speaker argues with her husband about some of the banal problems that couples often face: how to load a dishwasher properly, how to make space for one another in the bedroom closet. The poem keeps apologizing to the reader, because this marital squabble is about domesticity rather than about America’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. I quote the entire poem below:

Today I didn’t say divorce

because I was sickened by

the news

from Afghanistan, translators and their families

left waiting at the gates,

while American personnel

lifted off

in the wide indifference of their transport planes.

I said divorce because

I hadn’t made space

in the cabinet for my husband’s things,

and he was angry

I did not leave

a vacancy for what he carried home from war.

I was tired of him

stacking bowls

on the top rack of the dishwasher,

a policy

I can’t abide

when the lower rack is an open country

waiting to be washed clean.

Forgive me, reader,

for the weakness

of my marriage.

I didn’t say divorce

because my husband would rather a drone

hover above

a wedding procession,

the party far below,

embroidered dresses glinting, small mirrors sewn into the hems.

He prefers a pilot fire

from a distant, unendangered screen.

And I believe

killing should come

with a risk of dying for the killers.

But that’s not why I said divorce.

Forgive me, reader, for the poems

of closets and kitchens.

Marriage is not

two ideologies fighting at a table,

while the soup goes cold

on the spoon.

Marriage is two people

shouting about spices,

the ordering of jars—by alphabet or continent—

as if everything depends

on an ounce of turmeric fading

under glass.

Perhaps, I said divorce

for all the wrong reasons.

Forgive me

for scrubbing the pot with a bristled brush.

My fury

at the gold-stained enamel

is almost the same size as my rage

that somewhere a helicopter

strikes on civilians in the dark.

Forgive my sentiment.

All I can do is keep scraping

the dried burning from the pan.

“Marriage is not / two ideologies fighting at a table, / while the soup goes cold / on the spoon.” This perspective lies at the heart of all the poems in Civilians as well as those in Stateside and Dots & Dashes. My terrain is “the gold-stained enamel” pot into which I pour all my fury at the difficulties of being married, at the frustration of knowing and understanding another human being, and, yes, at foreign policy too, that the United States had decades to leave Afghanistan and when we finally did, we abandoned people who had risked their lives to help American soldiers.

“All I can do is keep scraping / the dried burning from the pan,” explains the speaker in “Domestic Policy,” The poem is an ars poetica. It argues: all I can do it keep writing poems that scrub at the charred places in my marriage. War is an enormous abstraction. I have learned to make global conflict concrete and personal by showing readers how it embeds itself in the objects of daily life. The stacked dishes. The bowl of soup. The dried and blackened pan.

My anonymous reader wanted me to reckon with my marriage. Reckon. The word has roots in Old English. To relate. To explain. To arrange in an order. Reckon is connected as well to the PIE root “reg,” which means “to move in a straight line.” That’s, of course, the task of poetry. Even poems about “closets and kitchens” are reckonings. The huge, wild generalization of war can be ordered into the careful, strict lines of a sonnet or a jagged piece of free verse. It can be placed in a bed. War can be laid between two sleeping bodies. All night, it will elbow them, toss and turn, pull at the blankets and the sheets. War will make it impossible for them to rest.