Miriam Sagan

The Old Soldier

was trapped in his label—not his given name, but the name he acquired in the story. He hadn’t always been old, but he had mostly been a soldier. Now he wore the tattered remnants of his uniform and carried an army- issued rucksack. Some things were not visible—the later years as a mercenary—with all the money now spent. The season with guerilla fighters. They’d burned a village to the ground, something he did not want to remember. These days, he liked to just ramble around. The landscape was quotidian northern fairy tale: four seasons, flowering hedges, geese flying in formation. He liked to pick raspberries in season. Pop a red juicy berry in his mouth. Swallow. He’d never been in love. Well, maybe when he was fourteen, with a girl from his own village who had long pigtails. He’d seen her swinging on a gate and he’d felt something in his chest that felt like hunger—something soft, red, pulsing. Something sweet.

Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. She is a two-time winner of the New Mexico/Arizona Book Awards as well as a recipient of the City of Santa Fe Mayor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts and a New Mexico Literary Arts Gratitude Award. She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gullkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and a dozen more remote and interesting places. SShe founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College until her retirement. Her poetry was set to music for the Santa Fe Women’s Chorus, incised on stoneware for two haiku pathways, and projected as video inside an abandoned building during the pandemic under the auspices of Vital Spaces.