Frank and Jackie Oppenheimer Escape to the Exploratorium

The planets grow around us

they swell into something sinister

bloated, blue, and bulbous

they careen in a vacuum- or maybe

there is an air around to pin them in place

a sinew of swung matches, a shut door

the tiny scream that is sucked between

your startled teeth.

 

The stilted shape that shadows my side

is too much, too full of swooping

radio signals and

shuddered shrieks of birds without beaks

to be you. It sits

like a crowded vessel with

an upside-down sail

it teeters on the edge of something

it thinks is keeping it safe.

 

It is funny that we keep building these things

little domes of spinning lenses, wayward planks,

sprawling maps that we would drag our fingers

across if they weren’t too sticky to touch

fly-paper singeing our fingertips

we have snuck here

to suck each others’ souls out through

the tunnels of our mouths

to rub our palms through

the funnel of balled-up fists and forgotten radar lists

that spirals through our brains when

we find a dark enough room- exoplanets wink down

at us but our eyes spin in their sockets from squinting

they grow into swirling spectroscopes and we can’t keep

them safe from the fumes that circle above.

This spectrum is stained with too much sky.

When will we learn that

the skies were not made for us to touch?

 

 

Frank Oppenheimer Reels in Russian Red on the Ranch

Thick little bundles of black-

Lists that lie still and safe

like slumbering padlocks in the field,

heavy blots blink across the ranch

motes of ash in my eyebeds

grow into a spattering of smog

a billow of black

the grass hides from the

ream of red that rushes beneath,

in the veins of the place

it scares the deep dirt out of its mind,

out of its skin. It does not want to know.

The House Un-American Activities Committee

draws breath before me

and somewhere their shirttails

rattle and moan beneath the heft

of their Hearings. Of their hearing.

The warning whispered into

the ground, patted down with

a rolled up newspaper and

the cakey blood clot clay

the quiet now, the watch your mouth

 

little secrets scatter and shake

atomos, pretty isotopes

warm pecks on my cheek

tiny hearts that squirm

from the soil, from the buried

remains of something once rosy,

of something that we shared.