A Poem by Jill Peláez Baumgaertner

Dog Tags

Here is the strangeness of all new rooms I have known.
The fresh paint does not quite cancel former occupants,
the hangers with hotel names, the pair of rubber gloves
underneath the sink, the box of clothespins on the basement
window ledge. I have not begun to know the hallway corners
in the dark. They are strange as wearing someone else's shoes.

Placed end to end the years of rooms clatter along like a train,
a stretch of places I have left myself chronologically.
In one of these my father enters, the new Colonel, jangling chains and tags
for each Cold War dependent--the latest military regulation
in case, he said they said, we are not known by our faces,
the metal rectangles with blunted corners will in their

deepened lettering link us to a line. It is taxing to wear such jewelry.
I imagine myself as thin as vapor. Caught by the grim beauty of a
mushroom cloud, would anything survive except my shadow?
Warm as my breath the metal creates its own space between
my still flat breasts. It burns under the shower after gym
and the chain begins to wear a dark streak into my neck.

Peláez: The letters spell my name. My father's. His serial number.
My blood type, race, religion. It is as casual and permanent
as the gardens my mother leaves behind each time we move.

Since then new spaces are uneasy, however
inevitably I enter them.