The Lucky Ones   We listened for them every night — the shells hitting Phnom Chat, just across the border, interrupting our after-dinner word games, discussions of war and love and telling ourselves what mattered. And then they came, electric thumps, and all the living things in the forest went mute, and we stopped drinking, stopped talking. Soon this became a game, each of us counting on our fingers every shudder, deep in the loins of the earth, engendering annihilation worth nothing to the cannoneers. Twenty-seven? one of us would guess when night resumed, a backrush of bugs and birds and mangy dogs that nobody seemed to own. In the fog of war, we would laugh, meaning: pal, you missed one, so have another shot of Mekong, another hit o’ the stick. Was it wrong when silence gave way to the irresistible tide of life returning, asserting its claims, restoring its clamor? We were the lucky ones, noncombatants, bleeding innocence, not the ones who got hurt.     © Michael Fleming Brattleboro, Vermont March 2022