Watching Godzilla While Trying To Forget My Ex
Monster’s awake: citywide blackout
like a cloth over eyes. Radiation threat
bigger than a planet bearing life.
Surround-sound explosions: yes,
I want to see the CGI bridge collapse,
to be convinced a nuclear winter
really will arrive at my door. Any instant,
it will come with dropped jaws and
a few suspenseful violins. Dogs
running to hide. One piece of a house
blown eight hundred miles from
his city to mine, riding a radioactive
wind: a piece of his house. I know it
the way dark cities know the sound
of backup generators failing. If I listen
to the night sky, he almost becomes
a roaring, a source of noise so loud,
I confuse it for my own thoughts.
Cures
The little balloon animals migrate
over our steel table, red as the ache
of an uprooted tooth, and opened: no,
it’s not considered a wound unless
the flesh is living. Our scalpels tease
out the breath of a balloon rat’s maker.
We compress it into strands of his words.
We count spelling errors, draw statistical
maps back to the deflated imprint
of a common ancestor, always seeking the
knotted rubber joint where souls attach,
a tight bend which can’t be dissected by
bone saw or knife. Only hard numbers.
We do this because we know the ways
it can shatter, and there are so many.
Kelsey Wiora is from a suburb of Chicago. She attended the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. In January, she packed her ’97 Grand Prix and drove to Raleigh, North Carolina, where she waits tables. She misses Illinois. She’ll probably come back soon, if she can bear parting with the sunshine and sweet tea.
Cover Photo: “Once A Fertile Land” by Eugenia Loli (http://eugenialoli.tumblr.com)