Oppenheimer’s Child

After bidding farewell to the wind-blasted alley,
the yellow-eyed Mezcal mutt you nurture
will follow you back to the concrete bunker
where canned beans bake under a broken lamp
and a wet poster of Jalisco jukes and rolls
with each broken string of thunder
quivering like the heavy light over empty Okinawa.

It is there, in the sterile womb of broken war bonds
and the thousand-eyed hydra of umbilical cords,
that you will reacquaint yourself with the old hunger,
crawling low between sheets and shells,
crying out for exile and twisting your crook’s thumb
in the direction of San Diego or Pomona—
somewhere back beyond the flowering arms of Okinawa.