Author’s Note: I was born in February in 1941, with the winter tremors of war already in my bones and therefore part of my personal and national inheritance. “Homeopathic Remedies for War Fever” seeks to address the ongoing malady that is war. It is a prescription for that illness we all are wounded by. Homeopaths take a touch of an illness and it gets them past the deeper, often fatal, and more devastating disease they have to live with. What remedies do we have for war—a touch of bitterness, trying to play dumb, rationalizing? But in the end if we get an actual taste of one small part of war’s terrible human waste—that girl-victim’s brown and beautiful eye—we perhaps will be properly horrified by war and more deeply moved to oppose it.
* * *
Take one coffee bean, darkest roast,
And with molars grind it to a pulp.
Ensconce it in the hollow of your cheek,
And nip at its bitterness with your tongue.
Take your grandmother’s sweaty black dress
And boil it in a cast iron pot. Place your head
Over the stew and pull the wool over your eyes.
Then breathe the vapors deeply in.
Bite your lip just hard enough to draw blood.
Then swirl the blood in your mouth
Until the acrid taste turns sweet.
Do not swallow or spit out.
Take one of the zeroes heaped like cord wood
In the bone yard next to the railroad tracks.
Remove two eyes from her face, brown and beautiful,
And wait for them to dissolve under your tongue.
Emilio DeGrazia
Emilio DeGrazia, from Winona, Minnesota, founded Great River Review in 1977. In 1984, Enemy Country, a collection of fiction about the Vietnam war, was selected for a Writer’s Choice Award. Other fiction such as Billy Brazil (1991) and Seventeen Grams of Soul (1995) also received awards. He has had two books of poetry published—Seasonings (2016) and What Trees Know (2021)—and he and his wife Monica have co-edited three anthologies of poetry and prose by Minnesotans.
