Explosive Imagination

Explosive Imagination
by Julia Lovett

Home life changed after the explosion.
Mommy got sick from the nuclear fallout.
Chizuko and I were jumping rope when the explosion
billowed into a mushroom cloud of nuclear explosion.
It looked beautiful – a mosaic celestial imagination,
but sirens soon screamed after the explosion.
Recess ended abruptly in wake of the explosion.
Daddy never came to pick me up. I waited alone.
All our lives shattered with that bomb alone.
Abstract justifications for the explosion
mean nothing to an island of orphans.
Our shelters explode with an abundance of orphans.

My family agreed to house some orphans –
our cousins’ parents died in the explosion.
In spite of their misfortune, they are lucky orphans
to have a warm home and family unlike most orphans.
Life appeared almost normal until the fallout
heightened and the hospitals filled until the orphans
became corpses and parents left more orphans.
Funerals grew perfunctory. I started to imagine
lilies dancing to the hymns sung at my own imaginary
funeral. I saw my anticipated future children as orphans
huddled together in the front row alone.
My hollow feelings resonate now that I’m alone.

Chizuko left school, so I jumped rope alone.
She wasn’t the first; kids trickled away. Orphans
retired to crammed orphanages studying alone.
Sharing bedrooms and bathrooms, never alone,
but always lonely, absent their family lost in the explosion.
One afternoon I fell down on the walk home alone.
I spent long, dizzy nights cooped up in my room alone.
Too scared to share, my sickness was my secret. Fallout
killed people quickly; too much time passed for fallout
to punish me with the A-bomb disease. I waited alone
expecting the worst while perpetually imagining
a world with a cure. Reality burst my imagination.

Japanese legend coupled with a vivid imagination
convinced me folding a thousand paper cranes alone
would appease the Gods enough for me to imagine
a cure to my condition. Despite my affected imagination
Mom knew I was sick. The doctor for orphans
at the Red Cross’ center tried to stifle my imagination
using big words and grave terms. Imagining
her daughter’s imminent death Mom cried explosively.
Fleeting moments until I joined the other explosion
victims buried in the ground – a mother’s worst imagination.
Body bags stayed full for years from the fallout.
Empty homes of fractured families all fall out.

I died after months of misery and the fallout
of my death captured the immensity of my imagination.
Sitting in funerals I always imagined a fallout
of lilies lacing my casket. The fallout
was folded like a lily’s soft petals, but origami alone
remembered my death. A thousand small cranes fell out
from their cage hoping to soar to a fallout
of peace. One of many deaths of an island of orphans,
nothing had to change – parents still died leaving orphans,
tragic memories still haunt an island, but the fallout
shifted from tragedy to inspiration: an explosion
optimistic for peace, a positive explosion.

An island of victims of a violent explosion
united to reappropriate tragedy toward peaceful fallout.
Fulfilling the Earthly dreams of my imagination
achieving more than I ever could alone –
an indestructible explosion of peace assembled by orphans.