Red Pulp Underground is an online nonprofit literary magazine.

Paul Coman

The White Blankets

The white men gifted them with blankets.

But several months later they were all dead.

Sometimes the word blanket should not be prefixed

with the word comfort

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The Iraq Poem

the cradle of civilisation
has become nothing more than
a mass grave for the uncivilised

imperial flag shrouds
to cloak the lies of the puppet masters,
these walking disasters,
pr men with candy-coated suppositories
and alternative histories
with justified sophistry,
they bring the young dead home.
caskets to oklahoma
and oh what a beautiful mourning,
the dawning of another grieving;
we are taking a leave of our senses,
this empire of the senseless,
a funeral pyre for the masses
and democracy washed in the pissing of blood.
the flood of nationalism,
not realising the chasm
between rationality and ignorance,
the growing significance
that a country is an artificial construct
and people often self-destruct
in the concentration camp of tribalism.

iraq is not a desert
but a fertile state;
too late now
to educate
and reinstate its colourful past,
because all that lasts
in our historical imagination
are massacres, racial disputes
and the incantation
of dehumanisation.
masturbation to the pornography of war:
bring on another one -
more, more, more!

if only humans could bleed oil
into the soil,
we might be able to grow again.
a new materialisation
of the cradle of civilisation.
but for now all we plant
is youthful blood,
thicker than
euphrates mud.