Eliot Khalil Wilson | Your Heroes for Ghosts

Your Heroes for Ghosts: poems by Eliot Khalil Wilson. Number 4 in Volume Six of our Editor’s Series.

[ cover image: Ludmilla Mayakovskaya, Rosebuds, ca. 1927 ]

Publication:  August 10, 2025 [100 copies]
23 pages
ISBN 978-1-960693-27-3
$ 12.00

Eliot Khalil Wilson has published two previous full-length collections of poetry, The Saint of Letting Small Fish Go and This Island of Dogs, as well as an audio chapbook, The Lunatic’s Left-Hand Man.

The Medic

The blast wind burns your face but you can see
the pavement seem to rise, a fistic bloom,
and then the sound that stops all sound–debris
falls in an angry rain through dust, and soon
you can gather the clues of what you are.
Then procedure becomes your prayer and shield:
both legs gone, so tourniquets, then morphine for
basilica vein, stretcher to nearest field,
then the wait, the wait for the chopper out.
Now you’re grateful for this ringing deafness;
you’re too weak to suffer the cries and shouts.
You keep the task before you, the process,
but alone, you recall the good, whole man
then the panic, the fear, these shaking hands.

[ Thanks to the editors of The Progressive for first publishing this poem ]
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