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Second PCS

by Brandon Hubbard

And the money runs out
so you couldn’t get home

Time went by
a year went by

To the winter again
where you load the
trunk in arid heat

And drove all night into the
Smoky Mountain gas-station towns

Turns slow-going to a higher place
where the trees are sketches in
graphite from a passenger window

And the road gets blacker
leading north

There is another kind
of crying than from the eyes

The sobbing we travelers
find behind our nose
and chests and throats

when we realize at the end
how far we have gone away
in calendars and waking dreams

Here the sky cuts open into the
other place, here the foot goes hard
burning this goddamn night
where the blue begins tomorrow.

Who We Are

Military Experience and the Arts, Inc. is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose primary mission is to work with veterans and their families to publish short stories, essays, poems, and artwork in our biannual publication, As You Were: The Military Review, periodic editions of Blue Nostalgia: The Journal of Post-Traumatic Growth and others. To the best of our ability, we pair each author or poet that submits work to us with a mentor to work one-on-one to polish their work or learn new skills and techniques.

Our staff is based all over the country and includes college professors, professional authors, veterans’ advocates, and clinicians. As such, most of our services are provided through email and online writing workshops.

All editing, consultations, and workshops are free of charge. Veterans and their families pay nothing for our services, and they never will.

Under our Publications tab, there are more than two dozen volumes of creative work crafted by veterans and their family members as well as a virtual art gallery. Our blog posts feature short pieces that cover a wide range of opinion editorials, literary reviews, and profiles on veteran artists and writers.

Please consider spending some time navigating our site and reading and seeing the fine work of veterans and their families from around the globe.

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