What you can do on solid ground
You can perform ten feet in the air
Blindfolded: catching your
Partner or flipping on a rotating wheel
High above the crowd. The airialist
Like a distant star
Doesn’t even know
Where she is, or that
She isn’t a woman in silver glitter
But a hydrogen bomb.
Mushroom clouds
Blaze outside of Las Vegas
Here dice roll by themselves
In a bell jar. And the heart
Goes out begging
As if it had never had a roof
To live beneath.
Here is an album
Of Before and After photos
Of J.C. Penny mannequins
Hit by a nuclear blast.
Personal radioactive monitors
Shown one kind of problem
But not all of it—
At the corner of Flamingo
An old man in a wheelchair
Sings a Soul song
Perfectly.
A doom town
Is a city the army builds
Out in the desert
Just to destroy it—
Like this one.
