As long as I’m alive, who can say I wouldn’t be coerced into using it again? – Dr. Serizawa (Gojira, 1954)
Brackish water detonates, stickleback failing
to squirm from the kingfisher’s bill.
Swept into the branches, what remains:
smash the spine, suck bladder from bone.
Pistol-mouthed sun edging the lips
of the river. Last night, I fired
upright in bed, struck by a moonbeam of panic:
Twelve years on, you’ve somehow escaped,
survived by a stream of electrons,
mourning notes, your candle’s animation
frozen on my laptop’s open window.
I almost titled this Open Window
to bear witness to not just your death
but the power of air, the advantage of height,
the threshold you once threatened
for my murder. Still your tremors
haul me, flailing on my side
in your mouth, from the boiling surface,
each eye fixed on its own dimension,
talon and water and sky. Here, the air
I can’t respire. The delta shrugs, pulls again
its body to its neck, forgets the waves,
the trace scales floating. Sleeps.
Surely you are not the last lizard
to crawl from this ocean.
If we keep testing this weapon,
you may yet rise again. If our atoms touch,
our bodies will explode.
Dan Schall is a poet and teacher based in Pennsylvania. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Willows Wept Review, Anthropocene Literary Journal, Arboreal Literary Magazine, Merion West, Cartridge Lit, Thimble Literary Magazine, The Shore, The Light Ekphrastic, Right Hand Pointing and many other journals.