They call it a nuclear missile.
The great equalizer. A man
dropped a bomb so big he could never
forget. This is how families begin: one accident
leads to the next and suddenly you're
giving your dog a one syllable name.
Spike. Spot. Boy. This is one big dick
joke. A mathematician walks into a bar
and there's no counter. A bar
walks into a city and stays there
until the neighborhood is gentrified
and all the poor people disappear.
This is fear in the modern era: you lose
your childhood home, all the awful
memories of your parents, the burning
smell of cup ramen smoking the microwave
because you forgot to add water,
which costs two ninety-nine
at the new organic food mart. You
want the whole thing to blow up
because you don't understand
what happens when the whole thing
blows up. You've never heard a gunshot
and you never want to. You want explosions
to remain in a state of metaphor: its smallest
anatomical structure, or something you see
in the movies. You don't expect it to be real.
You don't think there are that many men.