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)
