The Emergency Broadcasting System
Godzilla, it is me. The President of the United States
of America. I am speaking to you now from a bunker.
Yes, you have eaten New York. That was a given
the day you rose out of its harbor. You ate Rutger Street
and Bogardus Place. Lincoln Square and our best Broadway
shows. You swallowed all of lower Manhattan and then you
moved down the coastline. New Jersey. Rhode Island.
Virginia. Gulping all. Leaving radioactive footprints
the size of football stadiums whenever you left.
I did my best to delay you, King Monster. I sent new tanks
and helicopters. I sent grown men to swat at your chest.
But you brushed them of and ate our eastern seaboard.
Our skyscrapers going down your green throat. There is nothing
left of California. Nothing left of the once great Midwest.
You have left each prairie full of your poison. But listen,
Godzilla. I am not here to stop you. I am alone in my bunker
and thinking of you. Your tremendous body, alone
and hungry, rolling around the world that we dropped fifty
nuclear warheads on, and still you kept on drinking
our lakes while they burned. I do not know what you
want but I know the sound that you make when
you want it. Like a freighter is having a baby.
Like a moon is giving birth to a moon. I am not
here to stop you. No, Godzilla. I am speaking to you
now from our emergency broadcasting system, hoping
that maybe you can hear me, to say that there is no one
alive in this bunker. No one alive on the surface.
It is me, your president. And I am telling you that I will
wait here, underneath the burned lentils of my
incredible country, eating nothing but canned chickpeas
for years, and thinking of the wasted and leveled Mount Rushmore.
I will stay here, Godzilla, in my tattered blue suit until either
you go back to the ocean you came from.
Or—after nine months of walking across Iowa—you stop
in a rye grass or flax field to give birth to a beautiful baby
green boy. Because I want to be there, Godzilla, when you
look down and see a monster as powerful as you.
I want your baby to look down and see me.
I want to be the first thing it eats.
Paradise EP
Clear the snow carefully; there are egg shells tucked underneath.
Move the jaw firmly; watch the teeth part aside for the tongue.
There are certain parts of a songbirds brain where if you
touch it after death, the songbirds legs will still move. I think if we had small
enough tools, we could make it sing Lana. It’s been raining almost all
week in Chicago. Yesterday, we spent the afternoon in bed, while
somewhere an unplugged fridge fell apart in a matter of hours. In some
ways, its more impressive to take it down than it is to assemble. Less
instructions, more pieces to eat. I am an ostrich in a laboratory.
I am trying to find my eggs in the incubators. Put an ear in
my mouth if you can spare one. Tell me what you hear when I’m loving.
The hatch doors open. I hold out my hands to catch my come
falling out of your mouth. I think if we had tools small enough,
we could make cicadas sing each of her albums. If we moved
very slowly and carefully. And we promised it’d been seventeen years.
David Freeman is an essayist and poet living in Chicago, IL. His poetry and nonfiction has previously appeared in Ink Lit Mag, Earthwords, and Sky Over Blue Review. He has work forthcoming in Small Plate: A New Anthology and The Honey Bee Review.