Brian Turner

 1.In Kolkata, on Banamali Sarkar Street, I am a bewildered and ignorant tourist, just as I have been throughout my life, eavesdropping on people’s lives and conversations, jotting down notes, folding thoughts into whatever pattern I can make [...]

Viking Lander 1 made its final transmission to Earth November 11, 1982NASAOn approach to Mars, dunefields in the distance, the spacecraft descends within a storm of dust before landing on the Golden Plain, Chryse Planitia, which is a vast and stony d [...]

When the winds drive south from Anatolia, down through western Iraq and into the Kuwaiti borderlands, the dunes shift in waves, an ocean cresting in a swirling of dust the camels traverse at nightfall. And as years pass by, the wind presses on, [...]

Each night is different. Each night the same. Sometimes I pull the trigger. Sometimes I don’t. When I pull the trigger, he often just stands there, gesturing, as if saying Aren’t you ashamed? When I don’t, he douses himself in gasoli [...]

I’ve locked the doors tonight, checking the bolts twice just to make sure. Turned off all the lights. Only the fan blades rotate above, as slow as helicopters winding down in their oily gears. I can hear the water buffalo outside. They’ [...]

At 10,000 feet, the lights of Denver fade as pilots check their gauges, the Beechcraft’s engines thrumming my ears as elevation and cabin pressure block out passengers in conversation behind me, the world outside a distorted globe with my ref [...]

* Loaded down with prisoners after another night’s raid we pulled into the airbase in Mosul, the men gagged, zip-tied, blindfolded with engineer tape. Forsman ate a Snickers bar up in the hatch while everybody else slept shoulder to shou [...]

There is a man in a barber’s chair in Mosul, a professor of civil engineering at the local university, and he commends Nancy Ajram, who sings “Akhasmak Ah,” and he says—She also knows how to play the oud, though the barber doesn’t hear [...]

The appointed time of death that Muslims believe God has determined for every individual; it cannot be delayed or hastened. There are ninety-nine special names for God, my son, and not so long ago, I held you, newly born, under the light [...]

On the road to Marathon, Hwy. 90, just outside of Alpine, Texas, the gravestones stand chalk white under the thunderheads of summer, the afternoon rain in a slow roll across the earth’s wide amphitheater, from Fort Davis to here, where I [...]

Brian Turner earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and lived in South Korea for a year before joining the United States Army. He served in Bosnia-Herzegovina with the 10th Mountain Division and he was an infantry team leader in Iraq with the 3r [...]