HOW TO STAY SAFE When your wife asks if you want another child, tell her that the sun’s core is nuclear fusion that will one day consume the Earth, that the corner cemetery is wet and full of quiet bodies. There are guns on the news today—a grocery and a synagogue, and a school is no place for children anymore. Your son has a husky wail that cuts through the night. Your life is good but you don’t get enough sleep because no one is ever ready for a body to return to the soil. So stay awake. Drape your arms over their sleeping shapes in the dark. Wait for a light on the horizon.
WHEN OUR TWIN SONS ARE BORN I’m not thinking about those movie scientists reinventing the dinosaur over and over. A baby is not a thunder lizard, not a tangle of scales and teeth out for an easy meal, but two babies are a swarm of fingernails and hunger for love in the darkest heart of the night. Two babies arrive in the hospital room, with an announcement of everything we’ve been feeling these past few months, love starved and panicked for extinction. Extinction in fancy restaurants, in school parking lots, by the Chinese place in the mall food court—everywhere at once empty of bodies. And there in the house we never leave unlocked, our oldest son breaks open a fortune cookie but hasn’t yet learned to read. I remember the first time I held him to your neck, a promise that we will take care of each other until there’s a funeral. We don’t know what the future has in store for you, me, our son and these new babies of ours like those movie dinosaurs don’t know they are about to be destroyed, not because they are monsters, but because we made them.
W. Todd Kaneko is the author of This Is How the Bone Sings and The Dead Wrestler Elegies, and co-author with Amorak Huey of Slash / Slash and Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology. A Kundiman Fellow, he lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan where he teaches at Grand Valley State University.
