They called the prisoner only by his number, 5729243. But in the long years in prison each of those numbers became an image to him. He imagined each of the seven digits as the number of fish he caught on certain days, or different occasions of making love. He saw 3 as a woman’s breasts, of course, but he saw 7 as his mother looking over into his crib. He saw 4 as a man coming down the street with a folded newspaper under his arm inside which was a key to get him out. He saw 2 as people shivering at a Chicago bus stop, too miserable to talk to each other, and on another day it was he and his wife being married. 9 was the big-shouldered detective standing in the shadow of a doorway during a storm, lighting a cigarette, his face suddenly visible in the match’s flare. 5 was five judges sitting at a table. There was always an uneven number of people who would decide his fate. In his last years he saw a 6th person materializing in the dark. It was of course him, holding both self-judgment and a forgiving heart. He forgave his jailers; not because they were oppressors, but because they could only see the numbers as they were, perhaps to be entered in a log. They went home each day to a family, or none, or a bottle, and didn’t think of these things. The numbers merely added up to 32, into which one might divide 16, 8, 4, 2.

She looked in his crib,
tucked him in with his blanket.
Hard rain on the window.

Doug Anderson

is an American poet, memoirist, and photographer who was born in 1943, grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, and served as a combat medic in Vietnam. After returning home from the war, he studied acting at the University of Arizona, where he earned an M.A. degree. He later settled in Massachusetts and began writing poems in the Group 18 weekly writing workshop founded in 1986 by Jack Gilbert, Linda Gregg, and James Finnegan. [See Open Field: Poems from Group 18 (2011), an anthology celebrating “25 years of vigorous exchange” as described by Open Field Press.]

Anderson has written film scripts, fiction, and criticism, and his play, Short Timers, was produced at The Theater for the New City in 1981 (New York). His work has appeared in numerous literary magazines, including Cimarron Review, Connecticut Review, The Massachusetts Review, Nine Mile, Ploughshares, Poetry, Prairie Schooner, The San Pedro River Review, and The Southern Review, among others, as well as in the anthology The Hundred Years’ War: Modern War Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 2014).

His most recently published books are collections of poems, Undress, She Said (Four Way Books, 2022) and Horse Medicine (Barrow Street Press, 2015). His collection Blues for Unemployed Secret Police (Curbstone Books, 2000) received a grant from the Eric Matthieu King Fund of the Academy of American Poets.

His memoir Keep Your Head Down: Vietnam, the Sixties, and a Journey of Self-Discovery was published in 2009 by W.W. Norton and Company. And his war poems have been called “uncompromising” and “wrenching” by fellow poets and rank among the most honest, intimate portraits of war’s complex imagery. The Moon Reflected Fire (Alice James Books, 1994) won the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and was described by Joyce Peseroff, an Advisory Editor for Ploughshares and author of four poetry books, as “not just about Vietnam but resonant with the history of warriors from the backyard to The Iliad to the Bible.”

In addition to the war poems, Anderson’s work focuses on a range of contemporary issues and concerns, as well as deeply personal material. Dozens of these pieces can be found in Vox Populi, a curated webspace for Poetry, Politics, and Nature. He is also director of development for Blue Star Equiculture, a horse-rescue facility and organic farm.

Anderson earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Connecticut in 2006 and teaches in the department of comparative literature at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He has taught in the MFA programs at Bennington College and Pacific University of Oregon; Smith and Emerson Colleges; Eastern Connecticut State University; and the William Joiner Center for the Study of War and Its Social Consequences at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Aetna Award for Nonfiction, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), Virginia Quarterly Review, Poets & Writers, The MacDowell Colony, Massachusetts Cultural Council, and other funding organizations.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Doug Anderson’s writings for Vox Populi (from the present, August 2024, back to August 2014)

⚡ Undress, She Said by Doug Anderson reviewed by Robert C. Abrams in Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (Volume XX, Number X), JAPA Book Reviews: 7 August 2024

⚡ Horse Medicine by Doug Anderson reviewed by Frank X. Gaspar in Verdad (Fall 2015, Volume 19)