In Civilians, my current in-progress poetry manuscript, there are number of poems that function as small family portraits. This is a book that explores what it means for a service member to retire and to finally leave the military, reentering civilian life; many of the poems in the collection examine the distance between the experience of soldiers and civilians, particularly within the context of a family. One of those family portraits, “Brothers,” recently appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal and has just been republished on Verse Daily. You can read the poem here.