SPECIAL MISSION 16, SECONDARY TARGET NAGASAKI, AUGUST 9, 1945

Imagine men in suits and uniforms inspecting planes.
No visit to the city bombed—

too much devastation. They hear reports.
The next bomb supposed to be the 11th but weathermen predict rain.

They plan the site of Kokura but waste time waiting to rendezvous
with the plane Big Stink set to photograph the operation & clouds

roll in. Bockscar will make the drop. Early reports are wrong
and say The Great Artiste carries the plutonium almost absent

in nature. The Bockscar auxiliary fuel tank pump on inspection
fails, but no one wants to waste the payload in the ocean

close to Okinawa. The brass who knows of buildings
marked by a soot silhouette, the entire residue

of one of us, aim now for Nagasaki,
the city we don’t speak of the way we do

Hiroshima. Hannah Arendt calls decision makers
banal. They don’t look like lizards,

but disassociation blinds, deafens
& insulates from atoms of love—

undercover agents sitting next to us,
watching the latest Mission Impossible.

*

Laurel Brett, essayist, novelist, and poet feels the responsibility to do her tiny part to heal the world. She is inspired by awareness and love, and their expressions, and nature. Her novel, The Schrödinger Girl (Akashic Books, 2020) was called a page turner by the New York Times. Her work has appeared before in ONE ART, and in Second Coming, The Ekphrastic Review, Lilith, The Nassau Review among other outlets.