Cuban
Missile Crisis Anxiety
by
Steve Brammell
Lunch
in a brown paper bag, eating in the bleachers,
reading
my Lord
of the Flies,
the
other kids loud, but not enough to hide
the
sudden sirens in the distance only I can hear.
I
try not to move too fast across the basketball court,
its
circle a bullseye, push the bar on the exit door,
the
runaway elevator I’m trapped on never reaching bottom.
Outside
I sprint to the edge of the playground,
look
west where steel mills never stop smoking
and
the Nike base, with its white-finned rockets,
guards
against those slow bombers of another era.
Just
beyond the curve of the earth Chicago is the prize.
I
estimate the minutes it will take
for
grinning Khrushchev’s missiles
to
cross the Early Warning Line,
and
how many more until the people,
now
alert in the streets with nowhere to go,
all
look up, just like me, and watch the warheads,
bright
in the autumn sun, fall like Armageddon’s stars.
From
Steve Brammel:
I worked for many years as a technical and medical writer in
Birmingham, Alabama. I was also a frequent contributor to Birmingham
Magazine, Alabama Magazine, and other regional publications. My
feature each month in Birmingham Magazine examined life in the city
through a poet’s eyes. A long fascination with the culinary world
led to another career in the restaurant business. Marriage finally
brought me to Indianapolis, where I am employed in the wine trade,
and still writing. I was a member of Austin Poets Theater in my
younger days. I recently completed a manuscript of narrative poems
based on my time in the South titled Red
Mountain Cut.
I am a native Hoosier from Michigan City and a graduate of Wabash
College, where I studied with the poet Bert Stern.