The day the United States dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
your grandparents were busy removing one anothers’ skins
in their parents’ basements, getting wasted on cheap grape wine
as the bombs fell from the aircraft, immediately killing 166,000 people.
Language always fails us when we need it most.
Holding a lover who’s about to die in the hospital is like hearing
your name called by a stranger, the feeling of deja vu that comes
when the sky deepens into pink ash and you turn around, slowly,
with a growing sense of expectation, hoping to see the person
who’s filled their mouth with your name, but there’s no one there.
Twenty years later, your parents were undressing one another
in the bathroom of a shopping mall, getting high
off of coke, your father removing your mother’s shirt
to reveal the gleaming white skin underneath, like peeling
off a bandage. And the sound their mouths made when they met
like tiny explosions, like so many bombs dropped
from a great open sky, falling darkly, heavily,
every window lit up by flame.