one side of her face
she drowns at night
in deep cold sweat / dreams
she’s a sea monster
(hypnosis of dust motes / dead calm)
where are the fault lines
she hides along the floorboards?
what happens when she wakens
from this clam before the thorn?
tsunami goes to canada
she liked the clouds
which coasted down close
spoke to her sotto voce
in the glamorous
language of nebulizers
go away they seemed
to breathe (though not unkindly)
before sucking her deeper in
she stared smitten
at the mountains / stricken
afflicted by them
besotted in the lunch room
with an unquenchable crush
though maybe she worried too much
about bears / about pepper spray
the falls gave her strange ideas
about froth
and glitter
and churn
and spume
and spill
maybe someday she would pull back
and let it all go to fall like that
a silvery levering of pachinko balls
a cat vomiting from a great height
perched swirl of vertigo lurching
on the mountainside switchback
no taking back the swoon
animal portents foretell the rise of tsunami
when elephants kneel
pressing their trunks
down to the ground
like seismic antennae
when mole rats head-drum
adumbrations / listen for
predictions / augured jawbones
snugged to tunnel walls
when cats spill from windows
slip through opened doors
some welder’s torch sizzle
fizzing the tips of their whiskers
when insect swarms clot the shore
in a frantic tangled macramé
and hippopotamuses bellow
a chorus of mournful cellos
when snakes awaken
from hibernation / curlicuing
up from their dens
like bolts come unscrewed—
their frozen bodies
a semiology of hieroglyphs
in the snow:
実行してください離れて速く
津波が来ています。
非常に大規模な 1 つがここに向かっています。
危険にさらされています。
when double helixes spun by skeins
of flying sparrows unravel
when centipedes appear
in rippling synchronicities
when colonies of toads erupt
like burst popcorn
from ponds’ silver foil
when fish come unschooled
when bees abandon their queens
flee their honey
when silky clusters of bats lift
in smoky volcanic furies as if
rising / from a city ravished / in flame
radioactive man
the papers started calling me
Radioactive Man after tests from
the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency
revealed the highest radiation levels
in anyone they’d ever screened
I guess I’m the champion, I joke
to reporters who come for interviews
like visitors from another planet
bulky and brightly awkward
in white hazmat suits, they look
like mourners at a Buddhist funeral
and so I light a cigarette to dangle
from the corner of my lip and grin
even eight miles away, in Tomioka,
the sound of Reactor 4 exploding
was
