A short fuse fit just through the pinhole, and women drank beer when they’d finished their shiftwork building similar bombs across the street. Children danced on broken glass of classroom windows. They sang songs about flowers and plagues.
All around me people are falling on their forks. We drag comet tails through the streets like forgotten capes. We need a bandage. We need an adage, an adverb, a mountain sage. There’s a ringing in my eon. Whoever asks to, can come in. Raise your hand. The covers we pull up are made of magazines. Dear Atlantic, could you print something that doesn’t make me weep? I’m drying here. I want to mail you my heart. The part where you say ocean, the part where you say sure thing, the part where I turn into sky.
Jesus hears a swarm of bees beneath his porch. His television screen repeats the scene: runners blown off their lightweight frames, bystanders turned curbside amputees. Another urban cloud of smoke, the street littered with more paper. A man says a bomb doesn’t have to be big; thousands don’t have to die. An explosion of any size is enough. Shrapnel. Concussions. Lost shoes. Within the hour, automatic rifles hang heavy on shoulders in subway tunnels and established checkpoints. The female anchor, in her navy blazer, says there might be surveillance video: a dark-skinned man, a backpack left behind. Someone will answer for this, she says. He knows it’s only a matter of time until the bees will want to come inside.
Our daughter steps on roly-polies. She lifts black bodies from the sidewalk, and drops them into her green plastic bucket. How old are my hands? How old is our house? She says she wants to see what will happen. Why does grass bleed on my feet? Does it scream? She carries her bucket with two hands, bends the red garden gate, and steps stone to stone, toward dill and oregano. Their bodies are good for the vegetables. We watch from the far side of the parabola; it’s not all downhill from here, but it looks that way. Before dinner, we find her in the bathroom as she unloads more bodies from her pocket into the drain. Who did Anne Frank get to be next?
Jesus grips the wheel. Turns to watch shadows spread like stains across the grass median. Bits of paper and cigarette butts, a haphazard garden plot between two strips of cement. It’s been forty minutes and Jesus has driven two miles; he can almost see the freeway. All around him hope is lost, tossed from car windows. Now, the DJ wants everyone to call in, to vote: which video trending on YouTube should be used to announce the war? Jesus closes his eyes and sees the bodies of oarfish, washed up on the beach. An outcome of Japan’s nuclear fallout. Fracking. Mythical beasts that foreshadow massive earthquakes. Yesterday, off the coast of Catalina, fishermen found the skeleton of a Volkswagen, filled with finger bones all pointing west.
Our daughter thinks you’re sad. She saw your picture on the back of Phantom Noise and said your eyes look hurt. I described the war in terms that no one can understand. Everything I say will be on the playground tomorrow. She thought your mouth looked okay. She also liked the birds on the cover. A helicopter is a type of bird, momma. I did not read her the poem for your unborn daughter. I did not say what I think you are trying to say. I mentioned nothing about shrapnel, white space, or how it is to be inside your self inside the dark. Maybe next time a profile? Something near water, the focus a little less sharp?
Tonight is gut-shot with fireflies. The whole town is down by the river watching sky get drunk on gunpowder. Every year can be rolled like this piece of paper and slipped into a bottle. Domestic violence sounds soft, like pocket lint or game-show laughter. You think that bottle cap is a lucky charm. You think everyone carries an opener. You say worst-case scenario and I am standing in the war. I am standing in the water. How far to the barge of fire? How far upstream do I begin? What do my eyes look like from space?
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