Ellen Welcker
Our friend tells us about the childhood game
called “bag of danger.”
Outside the sky is August,
the weather is smoke, the color is yellow,
the boy at the bus stop's dad is buying coffee.
He is hard on his weird little child.
Someone says, she contains multitudes,
everyone chuckles. My son
would like to have a gun birthday.
He modifies, as he is wont to,
because of my face, its bags of wonder
and fatigue morphing incredulously:
There will only be one gun, he says,
it's a love gun, it shoots noodles, well—
it shoots bullets, but the bullets will just be
little plastic things. Harmless then.
Or not. Last night a splinter shot
from my heel, an inch long, had been
lurking, unseen, like the thing I have
in my blood. As do multitudes. The men
posture and snort and all the coastal peoples
lie awake. The mother is texting, do you want this,
do you want this. The child puts the phone
in her pocket. The men speak of lessons
and fury. Behind them is a time, less memorable
than the Mesozoic, or Paleozoic, a time
of pre-mammals, and an ocean of thick
strong shells. A time when the thing a child
now fears—some remainder of the brain's
evolutionary bag of tricks—turned the sea
into a sack of death; the sky, something
unbreathable. Today we are in the orange zone:
fine particulate matter is the matter,
which makes my lungs two bags
of danger. She put everything she could think of
in there, placed it at the center of the playground,
flicked a Bic, and ran. The weird little child
is crying. He doesn't want to have to always go
on a mission to find her. A mission, thinks the mother,
incredulously. Her eyes are filmed
with particulate, her heels and toes catch on the sheets.
At 9:15 the men dropped Little Boy on Hiroshima.
Three days later, at 11:02, Fat Man on Nagasaki.
In the living room, right now, at 12:41, the child
is sobbing: I'm so mad, I'm so mad, something
is the matter inside me and I don't know what.