Dear Joanna,
it’s been eighteen years
and I still don’t know how to respond
to your last letter,
the one where you said were sorry
but my country shouldn’t go to war,
shouldn’t make another girl grow up
like you did
with the sound of air strikes and tank fire
seared in their memory;
I think of you every time we start a new war,
how you sent me poems,
sweetly girlish verses
about early loves and family and the beauty
of the world around you;
how you sent me photos
of that world and invite me in,
invite me over
to hike the gold hills and green valleys
you were so proud of,
grinning teen girl in a clump of students,
how you all could be from anywhere;
how you’re afraid of loud noises,
bright flashes,
sirens and low-flying aircraft and smoke —
and how it wasn’t even your country being shelled:
a neighbor,
over the fence,
across the
invisible line between here and there,
but the sound carried,
the light and,
maybe, the charnel smell,
and about how you begged me,
“please,
don’t let them start a war,”
and I didn’t know how to explain
to either of us that
there was nothing I could do
and nothing I could say
to make it stop.
Helen Doremus is a screenwriter and storyteller based in Los Angeles. A native of Fort Worth, Texas, Helen has come to most things in life slightly sideways of the prescribed fashion, accumulating odd bits of life as she goes. A choral singer, a kung fu practitioner, a Santa Fe Johnnie, a fiber artist, a high school dropout, a CASA volunteer, and a member of the asexual community, Helen’s first published work was a wordsearch celebrating the 25th anniversary of Sesame Street and her first film was as an unnamed child in a movie that was never released. She is a recent graduate of Antioch University Los Angeles and the screenplay she wrote as an independent study while attending, “Romanza,” won fifth place in the 2019 Launch Million Dollar Student Screenplay Contest.