October

October, nineteen sixty-two.

The season of polished smiles.

Television light upon the White House façade.
Jack Kennedy at the lectern, measured,
the vowels precise as a surgeon’s incision.
Jackie moving through state rooms
like a minor key in satin.
Camelot, they said.

Youth crowned with laurel and flashbulb.

Meanwhile,

In Cuba, cylinders of intent
rose among the cane.
In Moscow, winter folded its arms.
In Washington, D.C., maps were stippled with red arcs,
clean trajectories across blue water.

The phrase mutually assured
entered the bloodstream.

Assured of what?

An ordinary hospital.
Linoleum the color of diluted bone.
A clock rehearsing circularity.

No velvet drapery.
No orchestral swell.

My mother bent around pain
while the century bent around calculation.

Outside:
yield, radius, retaliatory capacity.
Inside:
pulse, dilation, insistence.

Two brinkmanships.

“Fellow citizens—”
the broadcast voice steady,
cadence trained for permanence.

Elsewhere a hand hovered above consequence.
Codes slept in briefcases.
Submarines listened to the pressure of the sea.

The sky had already proven
what it could do to cities.

Ash without distinction.
Light without mercy.

It required only decision.

Birth is a small detonation.

Muscle splitting the ordinary.
Blood writing its red memorandum.
A body expelled into atmosphere.

I entered the air
while extinction was plausible.

No one in the corridor spoke of megatons.
A nurse adjusted her cap.
Metal trays chimed without prophecy.

Camelot shimmered in monochrome.
Teacups, symphonies, cultivated wit.
The republic styled as courtly legend.

Yet beneath the polished jawline of power
sat the arithmetic of vapor.

The President’s voice entered living rooms
like a measured psalm.

My cry entered a room
without audience.


What is inauguration?
What is delivery?

One nation poised between breath and fire.
One infant poised between silence and speech.

The planet balanced upon deterrence,
a logic thin as glass.

I balanced upon a hand
gloved in latex and fatigue.

First breath.

An intake without clearance.

Outside, annihilation rehearsed itself
in memoranda and shadowed rooms.

Inside, the species persisted
in a single untheorized gasp.

Camelot.
Quarantine.
Launch window.
Apgar score.

The missiles would be dismantled.
The myth embalmed.
Photographs archived in silver and dust.

But in that October light
the future was not guaranteed.

It was negotiated in secrecy
and delivered
in an unremarkable ward.

I began
while the world considered
its end.