We open on the air show. We open
on America. Open on careful amber waves of hair
the audience is meant to view as real, rather than a wig.
Open, the white woman’s awe, in the sky—
her body’s cortisol knowing each time the fighter jets rattle
the windows and the sunglassed summer crowd.
Somewhere there is a bomb
in that sound for someone. She has a flitting thought but can’t help
feeling its conclusion went wrong, somewhere.
She thinks of her fiancé’s work
and what she does and doesn’t know
of it, all that rests on getting it right as he grips fistfuls of his hair,
leaning over printed charts on the kitchen table.
The woman remembers every b-movie sci-fi
she’s ever seen, how quick you should’ve known turns to
now see what you get in her perfectly lipsticked mouth,
her tongue lashing the edges of the girls onscreen,
how the deserved gets formed in the frame, the shot
everyone is shown. An eerie glowing-eyed child told her
at the midnight show last week
they wanted their people to live, expand, unbothered,
and the men in the imperial war room
called them a colony of ants and bees in calm, squashed voices.
As a child, she burned insects from above
with a magnifying glass, and was later dragged inside crying
by her desperate mother as the fire ants died with their jaws
locked like vengeant red clay onto her legs.
She almost wants to feel
some comfort in this pain, sometimes now, looking back,
like welts and tears paid something
she had no other tender to pay.
As the woman sees a saucer descend,
as the July Fourth spectators learn this isn’t a show
of power or a blue-skyed spectacle, her face is lit green
from below, showing clear in shadow the bags under her eyes
that TV-white concealer had carefully, warmly covered.
We hear her scientist calling behind her,
as the dissonant string music slowly smothers his desperation,
as she stands silhouetted in the opening door
of the invaders’ ship. She was certain she deserved
something, the cut to credits seemed to say,
as if the filmmakers thought it too gruesome to show
the whisking away of the helpless wide-eyed
love, or whatever would have happened to her
had the cameras kept rolling.
But the audience seemed to accept
what it was
and know everyone else must know too,
and, driving home, the ones who’d forgotten
found themselves staring at the unthinkable stretch of headlighted road,
watching for dangers to leap into view,
scratching at the why like a livid invisible itch they’d given themselves,
told to avoid touching.