Fission is a Bomb is a Fist is a Kiss
The “Fat Man” bomb dropped
on Nagasaki should not
be a metaphor for anything
and the fact the bomb’s target
was at the heart of the city
and the fact that it missed
its mark is ironic because
“missed its mark” is what
cheit means in the Hebrew
Bible, not “sin” like those with
the mind of a child think because
who but a child would smash
an entire city just because he can,
but I digress and it’s complicated
why a bomb has a hot pressed
plutonium heart as big as a fist,
and that fist was as beautiful
as a perfect kiss, as my lover’s
breast which my hand is obsessed
with—that a mushroom cloud is what
it looks like when that hand closes
so tight on itself that it makes
a Geiger counter tick and a man might
mistake it for righteousness—
and haven’t we all been there, at war
with someone who is definitely not us
and most definitely is—and how
fortunate I, in particular, am that I
didn’t have an A-Bomb in that hand
when my lover and I were younger,
when my lust was radioactive and under
the pressure of a shaped-charged-
blast that I forged out of
a man-child’s expectations of what
a city of love was to look like.
The Fig, the Firefly, and What We Carry
This is a time for a child’s hand
to hold mine, to not fear the flesh
that shrivels like a fig in autumn, the time
to caress the bleeding bruised skin
thin as the skin of an onion. Open
a bed to two old lovers whose
hands intertwine like recollection,
like lemon peel, whose probing
fingers open a door, their time-lined
palms waning moons that unfold
one and the other, like splitting
the fig of their tender places. They savor
the seedy, the sweet— forgetting
that one will die before
their lust does and the other will carry it
like a child carries a firefly in
his cupped hands trusting
darkness can be illuminated
by such a tiny light.
