My poem “Hollywood Camouflage” has been published in the Spring 2020 edition of Apeiron Review (page 99)

 

 

Hollywood Camouflage

 

At the Burbank Lockheed factory

my great-grandfather built P-38s hidden

beneath a fake farm. The Total War era

meant battlefields without bounds

and combatants on assembly lines.

 

Hollywood set designers draped netting

over the buildings, painted runways and

parking lots green, rigged trees with wire

and feathers, brush strokes of fake decay

a pastoral matte board to fool any pilots

searching above for the war engine.

 

The plant managers directed their labor

choreographed small shifts in and out

hid smoke breaks in an empty silo.

Workers pinned their family’s laundry

on the clothesline between hours of welding.

 

(full poem available at Apeiron Review)

 

Image Credit: David Bransby “Production. Lockheed P-38 pursuit planes. A new Lockheed P-38 pursuit plane, complete except for propellers, is hoisted from a station stand in a large Western aircraft plant assembly line. From here, the ship will be rolled to the testing field where the propellers will be installed and trial flights will be made ” The Library of Congress (Public Domain)