New Prose Poem in Print

The current issue of Pear Noir!, just out, includes my prose poem "Interview with a Recluse." Here's a scrap:

... He said he’d long wanted to understand the innocence that can carry a lie, the dark lines laid down to claim ownership, identity, to create a principality and the readiness to die for it. He believed he could understand hate. The soldier came to hate at some level the comrade entrenched beside him. You hated because you wanted to love. Because the prospect of loss was a ruthless constant. Nations were no different, societies. What you hated were the unnatural constructs — the country you were dying and killing for. And you hated the natural constraints — isolating desert, seas, constriction of the mother tongue and the home religion. These made love impossible. The strangulated need to love grew into hate, until you believed you could love a nation, a theory, and kill for it. ...